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Technology Stocks : SAP A.G. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: deeno who wrote (3000)	1/29/1999 10:55:00 PM
From: Doug	Respond to of 3424

deeno: What is your target for re-entry.?

To: deeno who wrote (3000)	1/29/1999 11:02:00 PM
From: mauser96	Respond to of 3424

see fool.com A discussion of PSFT< but SAP and ERP field mentioned also. You are right on about this being an industry problem - as long as the earnings remain disappointing the entire industry will be approached by analysts with suspicion. Furthermore projected earnings are not believed ,since many of the analysts believe they have been mislead in the past. Meanwhile SEBL's good quarter indicates ERP company moves in that direction aren't winning. Under these conditions, hype won't move the stock. It's going to take a period of trust rebuilding and some good earning reports. IMHO, it will be late 1999 at the earliest before we can expect it to regain any of it's former glory. I don't know how many market players it takes to change a light bulb, but it takes a lot of them, working very hard , to pick up a fallen gorilla.

To: deeno who wrote (3000)	1/30/1999 10:43:00 AM
From: Trader Dave	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3424

Ignoring the adr's you could substitute SAP with SSAX and change the date back 6 years or so and argue your way into owning this maturing company all the way down. The high end market is mature, the mid range has much more competition and although there are many more deals, they are much smaller. FOR SAP to keep growing, they must sell an INCREASING number of new customers at the same ASP each year. That will be especially hard since their business was artificially stimulated by y2k remediation. Many companies that could have put off purchases to later times, bought in the 1995 to 1998 time period. AMR's market estimates are self justifying nonsense, since they are saying that all enterprise apps are "ERP." I wonder how SAP will do in the front office versus Siebel? Gee, in addition to trying to keep their existing legacy customers happy and laying off staff, they are desperately trying to create products that must integrate with their existing systems in the following areas: sales force automation supply chain document management workflow data warehousing rolap customer service facilities maintenance e-commerce enterprise integration dbms tools and many others.... I'm sure they'll do almost as well as Lotus did in creating 1-2-3 for Windows in all of these new areas, especially since they have no competition. Yeah, they'll "grow" in 1999, but only in service revenues. I'll make this bet: they don't see anything near 10% license growth in 1999 and 2000, then in 2001 services will fall off. It will take time, but you are at the beginning of the end of the growth for this mature company. Caveat: Yes, I am and have been short for some time. TD

To: deeno who wrote (3000)	1/30/1999 1:30:00 PM
From: David W. Ricker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3424

deeno, great post. My question is, why do you think that things are not going to pick up until 1/1/00? I think a lot of expenditure for remediation will end sometime in late Q2, early Q3 (my sector of Lockheed Martin is scheduled to finish end of March, most of the corporation a couple months before that, i.e. about now). 1/1/00 assume most companies are going to the wire (and maybe they are). Plus, the investment curve I think will lead the growth curve by about a quarter. As the Y2K spotlight gets focused, I think attention will focus on the SAP and PSFTs of the world much sooner. Perhaps this summer.Your right about dead money for a while in this sector, the big question is when will it begin to rise again? I am wrestling with the idea of selling now and trying to time the curve, but I have been an abysmal failure at that in the past, so I will probably just stand pat.