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Technology Stocks : Premiere Technologies (PTEK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J. M. Burr who wrote (477)	2/17/1999 6:25:00 PM
From: Lord Smooth	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1270

Company held a conference call today... Reported earnings going forward are going to be lower than previously thought because of an accounting change... They now have to amortize $350 million of intangible costs going forward... An analyst on the call suggested this could be over the next 7 years... So maybe we have $50 million negative impact per year on earnings... Since these are intangibles, this has no real cash impact... Apparently the company purchased about $10,000 of stock it wasn't supposed to the SEC came down hard on such a trivial issue... They also have to restate previous earnings to take in account purchase method that they are now forced to use by SEC vs. the pooling method they used before... More positive, the company said it will make announcements about its relationship/interaction with WebMD in the next few weeks, that WebMD is great at making other partners... Most absurd thing I heard on the call: Management compared PTEK's $400 million market cap to AMZN's $16 billion market cap..., and they are wondering why they can't get a higher valuation... Of course, mgmt did not bother to explain why half of mgmt is selling significant amout of PTEK shares... I can't believe they said that... Do they really think these wall street analysts on the call are that stupid... I don't think AMZN has a class action law suit, and using purchasing methods for acquisitions... The analysts did not give the company as much grief as they could have. The worst an analyst said was that it seems as if the company is not paying attention to the bottom line. Mgmt seemed to be taken aback by this, responding something like... "of course we look at the bottom line" but one has to wonder how they look at the bottom line when they essentially added $50 million to costs for the next seven years because of some accounting fuck up... My take on the stock is if this sells off even more tomorrow, which is probably likely by at least one point or 2, it could be a good buy---but only if you believe a WebMD connection will hype this thing. I take no responsibility for the accuracy of this information or for any actions you make take based on ths information. For all I know, I was hallucinatining while I wrote this...