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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JRI who wrote (105528)	2/26/1999 11:02:00 PM
From: Naggrachi	Respond to of 176387

<<Even still, you have the more important point (by far)..Dell is clean, Compaq is not only simultaneously fluffy and complex, but the numbers reek a little, too...>> Your comments are dead on, for more of the stuff you're talking about, check this out: fool.com Sorry if it already has been posted. Zead

To: JRI who wrote (105528)	2/26/1999 11:18:00 PM
From: abraves	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

No question... CPQ up to the same old stuff. They had a good Christmas on paper, and now they have to face the music in the upcoming quarter. Next thing that will happen is the analysts will see how much CPQ has in the channel and they will say PC demand is slowing. blah blah blah Did you see Pisani today saying that the most asked question around the floor today was "what will it take to get all of the money market money into the stock market". My response to that question is tell all the analysts to SHUT UP !!!!!!

To: JRI who wrote (105528)	2/27/1999 2:26:00 AM
From: jim kelley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

John, You are right there was no way that CPQ was going to report a 20 cent quarter. In my estimate I was using the 26% tax rate from Q3 instead of the 18.6% tax rate of Q4. I also assumed service revenues to be the same and product margins to improve by a percent or 2. The tax rate assumption was too high and the revenue number turned out to be too low. Otherwise the SG&A was deadon. What made CPQ numbers work was channel stuffing that increased the revenues do to product by between 10 and 20% percent. This is only 2 to 3 weeks of stuff. This is really easy to do for CPQ. So do not take the CPQ number of 20 cents too seriously when dealing with a silly putty financial statement. If CPQ's Q4 was restated without the channel stuff, I estimate a 26 cents a share in real earning. Their hardware business is not significantly profitable. Most of the profit is coming from the service business. Regards, Jim Kelley