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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (44264)	1/22/1999 1:25:00 AM
From: Earlie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Yiwu: I've been muttering about IBM's "growth-multiple-but-no-growth" numbers for several quarters. If one looks back over the last 9 or 10 quarters, the revenues, margins, profits, and bottom line have all been flat to down. Meantime, the high margin business has eroded and the service business (in which a company has a lot of accounting room) has magically increased each quarter enough to replace the missing hardware,et al business. Over that period, the stock has more than tripled. Makes no sense. While the analysts have diddled with their computer models, trying to find something (anything) "positive" in the earnings statements, Louis has been gutting the company. Check out the disappearance of cash, which has been more than cut in half. At the same time, debt has gone off the graph ($9.0 billion to close to $30.0 billion over the discussed period). Many people missed it, but he sold off the printer division (no big deal) and the global data network (really big deal,...a crown jewel) during the past quarter, presumably to raise cash ($5.0 billion) for further obscene stock buy backs, which ensure that shareholder equity continues to evaporate. Meantime Louis and his fellow execs sell off stock at an amazing rate, (including Big Lou's options to 2003 as earlier mentioned). I thought they would trash this stock in each of the last three quarters, based on flat-slightly-declining reported numbers. They more than doubled it instead. Hard to comprehend. Incidentally, I loved IBM's comments on PC sales growth. (g) Best, Earlie