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Technology Stocks : Micron Only Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fabeyes who wrote (43852)	3/15/1999 10:27:00 PM
From: Thomas G. Busillo	Respond to of 53903

Fabeyes, I thought the title of "shareholder" was a little curious for those 2 late-February insider filings <g> I think the "specifics" of MQD deal were buried in their 2Q'98 filing. Hang on... 7. Purchase of minority interests In the second quarter of 1998 the Company purchased the 11% minority interest in its subsidiary, Micron Quantum Devices, Inc., for $26.2 million in stock and stock options. The cost of the acquired interest was allocated primarily to intangible assets related to flash semiconductor technology, which is being amortized over a three-year period. "Primarily" to intangible assets. Why bother to give an exact number when a loose term like "primarily" will do? <g> Good trading, Tom

To: Fabeyes who wrote (43852)	3/15/1999 10:36:00 PM
From: John Graybill	Respond to of 53903

Fabeyes, you probably don't realize that cause and effect are exactly reversed. The subsidiaries were probably set up as a tax dodge. MQD, for example, was ostensibly set up as a separate company, but in fact it was Micron's flash memory division. There's nothing but losses for a couple of years when you start from scratch, but "losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars per month" in these subsidiaries would have been "hundreds of thousands of dollars spent for Research and Development per month" if they had been incurred at MTI itself. The MQD deal was the most hostile of hostile takeovers. One of MQD's VP's quit in disgust within two weeks of finding out the details of the deal, the other one quit within six months, and some of the designers and engineers who had been there almost since it was founded also quit. That's what slowed down the product pipeline. As far as "insider trading", there has probably been none -- in a takeover of this type, the stock of the surviving company is restricted from sale for a year. This is an SEC rule (144 I believe) that is designed to keep robber barons of yore from taking over a company for the purpose of dissolving it. Thus a real answer to your rhetorical question, "I wonder if this will ever show up as a loss somewhere": I have no doubt that former MQD and Rendition shareholders, for example, are staring at the daily graph in horror as their paper losses drop by tens of thousands of dollars per individual.