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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg Boris who wrote (58723)	1/11/1999 5:39:00 PM
From: H.A.M.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

CNBC's FABER REPORT: Lucent/Ascend Rumors Abound Dow Jones Newswires January 11, 1999 The following report was aired Monday on CNBC-TV by CNBC reporter David Faber: "We'll start with shares of Ascend Communications, which are up strongly today on a report that it is in talks to be acquired by Lucent. Neither company is offering comment on a story that has had a very long life. I have not been able to confirm the two companies are talking. That said, I will tell you that Lucent is rumored to be holding a board meeting on Tuesday evening to consider this deal. That is rumor, as is price talk here, which I will also pass along. The rumored price is between 0.7 and 0.77 of a Lucent share for each Ascend. At Lucent's current price that translates to a range of $78 to $86 per Ascend share. Today, analysts have said the deal would not prove dilutive to Lucent up to between $82 to $85 a share, depending on which analyst you're talking to. The market has widely expected Lucent to make a large acquisition in networking since October, when its ability to account for such a deal as a pooling went into effect. But it has been unclear whether Lucent feels a need for a big deal in an arena with rapid product transitions that can bring fairly rapid movement in market share. If Lucent does decide to try and buy Ascend, it would be gaining an installed base of customers to whom it might hope to offer a broader array of products. It would gain a decent distribution system, an asynchronous transfer mode edge switch and complimentary remote access solutions. All that means Lucent would be competing squarely against Cisco Systems as it focuses more directly on the movement of data over networks based on the rules of the Internet. On now to Goldman Sachs. While the firm is saying that CEO Jon Corzine is stepping down from that role to focus on the company's plans to go public, from what I hear inside Goldman, those plans remain anything but a certainty. When Goldman last spring went through a wrenching internal debate over whether to pursue a public offering, sources tell me Henry Paulson, John Thain and John Thornton were all against such a move. Paulson was soon elevated to the role of co-CEO and changed his position. But Thain and Thornton are believed to remain in opposition. Those three men will now be effectively running Goldman Sachs, with Paulson as the sole CEO and Thain and Thornton as co-chief operating officers. Given that, one must wonder whether the public offering will ever come to fruition. As for Corzine, while he will retain the co-chairman title, he is expected to focus on his own strength, namely dealing with people as opposed to strategy. Few insiders expect he will stay with the firm in an active role for very long."