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Strategies & Market Trends : Stock Watcher's Thread / Pix of the Week (POW) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stock Watcher who wrote (5283)	3/31/1999 8:39:00 AM
From: Francois Goelo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 52051

SW, UCMP is doing it again! Great synergistic acquisition should add... a fair size bundle to their bottom line: UniComp Acquires Carlton Software Production, Ltd. Accretive acquisition enhances UniComp's presence with major corporations MARIETTA, Ga.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 31, 1999-- UNICOMP, INC. (Nasdaq:UCMP - news) today announced that, as part of the company's strategy for enhancing its worldwide presence as a leading provider of end-to-end software solutions, it has acquired Stockport, England-based Carlton Software Productions, Ltd. Carlton Software is the premier provider of a comprehensive suite of systems management software for the IBM AS/400 system with a customer list that included many of the world's major corporations including IBM Global Services (NYSE: IBM - news), Barclay's Bank, Nikko Bank, First National Bank of Boston, Coca-Cola (NYSE: KOF - news), Gillette (NYSE: G - news), Colgate Palmolive (NYSE: CL - news), Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT - news), Northern Telecom (NYSE: NT - news), Allied Distillers, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, and the Searle Division of Monsanto (NYSE: MCT - news). The transaction was accounted for as a purchase and is being paid for in cash. According to UniComp President and CEO Stephen A. Hafer, UniComp will consolidate Carlton Software Productions into the UniComp Solutions organization. Further terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. ''We intend to take advantage of the consolidation within the software industry and will continue to identify and evaluate profitable companies with core business synergy,'' said Hafer. ''The acquisition of Carlton allows us to add depth to our suite of software solutions. Carlton's prestigious customer base and strong presence in the AS/400 after market, will open the doors of major corporations for an introduction of our complete line of sophisticated software products and services,'' Hafer added. ''We are proud to be a part of the UniComp Solutions organization,'' commented Carlton Managing Director, Steven G. Mengell. ''With UniComp's infrastructure and worldwide distribution and support capabilities, we can now expand our sales efforts within our current customer base while having the international presence and wherewithal to target other large multi-national corporations requiring an end-to-end solution - sales support, training, installation, and technical services,'' continued Mengell. Carlton, now doing business as UniComp Solutions, designed mAStermind as a suite of IBM AS/400 operations, application development, and management software. This comprehensive software suite provides the 'control center' for IBM AS/400 with such automatic features as disk allocation, job scheduling, back-up and recovery, data compression, and spool filing. mAStermind is now being marketed and supported through UniComp Solutions' North American, UK, Ireland and European sales and marketing operations. About UniComp UniComp, Inc. develops, markets and supports platform-migration, vertical market applications and payment processing systems for Windows NT and UNIX-based computer systems and point of transaction processors worldwide. The Company licenses its technology to a cross section of industries including manufacturing, distribution, transportation, public-sector, point of sale and transaction processors. Additionally, the Company provides installation, training, systems integration, support and year 2000 services, serving a worldwide network of end user customers, dealers and distributors. UniComp employs over 400 staff worldwide and has over 50 distributors internationally, with over 30,000 installations in more than 55 countries. Please visit our World Wide Web site at unicomp.com for further information on UniComp. Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this news release pertaining to market penetration by UniComp and Carlton of the company's suite of software products are forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including timely development and market acceptance of the companies products, the impact of competitive products and pricing, and the other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's publicly available reports. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contact: UniComp, Inc. Robert Shaver, 770/424-3684, ext. 116 or Investor Relation Resources Marty Tullio, 949/376-4458 -------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: Stock Watcher who wrote (5283)	3/31/1999 9:31:00 AM
From: Dave Gore	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52051

ON CYSS, Shares outstanding I believe are 9 mil / float 250K, according to Mike Hanson of CYSS from a conversation last week

To: Stock Watcher who wrote (5283)	3/31/1999 10:57:00 AM
From: flickerful	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 52051

RCNC. RCN Gets West Coast Approval By Randy Barrett March 31, 1999 10:27 AM ET RCN announced it is accelerating its expansion into California and has received approvals from San Francisco to build a fiber network. The cable-Internet-telephone company already has won permission to expand into South San Francisco and San Mateo and plans to push southward into Silicon Valley. RCN will fund the activities with $1.25 billion in new capital raised from the sale of senior convertible preferred stock and a $1 billion bank loan from Chase Securities. "Now that the initial phases of RCN's business plan are fully funded, we are moving very rapidly to deploy network and begin serving customers on the West Coast," RCN Chief Executive Officer David McCourt said.

To: Stock Watcher who wrote (5283)	3/31/1999 12:18:00 PM
From: CIMA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52051

Why Internet shares will fall From The Economist 30 Jan 99 INDEX TERMS Internet\|overvalued shares, inevitability of fall; Shares\|Internet, overvaluation, inevitability of fall; Stockmarkets\|Internet shares' overvaluation, inevitability of fall; DATE 30-Jan-99 WORDS 1014 Why Internet shares will fall "THE electric light is very probably a great invention, and . . . let us take it for granted that its future development will be vast. But this, unhappily, cannot be urged as a reason why the pioneer companies should be prosperous." Time and technology have moved on since 1882, when these words appeared in The Economist (as recently spotted by the Wall Street Journal, assiduously reading our back copies). But the same sentiments apply to today's great invention, the Internet. Because it is a potent and entirely new medium, the net will change the way the world works and plays. Even so, today's pioneering Internet companies are unlikely ever to earn the vast profits needed to justify their current share prices. Indeed, future historians may well add Internet shares to a long list of industrial assets-including biotechnology firms in the 1990s, radio companies in the 1920s, electric-light companies and railways in the 19th century-that have come spectacularly crashing to earth. This newspaper has long argued that shares in general are overvalued, especially in America. And, because American consumers have used their new-found paper wealth to justify spending more and saving less, the economy looks vulnerable to a collapse in share prices. But the inflation of Internet shares is, in many respects, quite different. Whereas investors on Wall Street are merely exuberant, the casino capitalists who spend seven or eight hours a day at their PC s trading Internet shares appear to be stark, staring mad. Most of those who have watched enviously from the sidelines sense that gravity will assert itself sooner or later. Many of the online gamblers who have earned a fortune in paper profits betting their savings on shares in Yahoo!, Amazon and the rest will never get their money out. For the very features that have led to a near-vertical climb of Internet share prices also favour its precipitous collapse. Most Internet companies go public by selling only a handful of shares: only 34% of Amazon's equity is publicly traded, and a mere 9% of that of eBay, an online auctioneer. The few available shares are greedily snapped up by a cyber-army of online "day traders" via electronic brokerages, such as E*Trade. Amazon's entire float changes hands twice a week. Hedge funds that sold what they thought were already overvalued shares they did not actually own have scrambled to buy back as prices rose. Just as tulips only became truly manic when ordinary people started trading bulbs in Dutch taverns, so the trebling of Internet values since September has been accompanied by a surge of trading among people unskilled in the art of valuation and unburnt by past losses. All this is likely to reverse with brutal rapidity. A thin market exaggerates falls as well as rises. The new online brokerages may not be able to handle large volumes. Suddenly, hedge funds will start selling. As losses mount, and buyers disappear, inexperienced investors could well panic. Nobody can predict the extent of the fall. Even the experts do not know how to value Internet shares. Bill Sharpe, for example, who won the Nobel prize in economics for work on pricing financial assets, is enough of an Internet believer to have founded an online financial-advice company. Even he admits that "we are all pretty much flying blind." The problem is not merely that few Internet companies actually make a profit (though this makes traditional measures of value somewhat redundant). Although few now doubt that electronic commerce has a thrilling future, reasonable people differ over what, and how profitable, that future will be. Some venture capitalists and executives reckon that the biggest profits will be earned by companies that establish a strong brand by virtue of being first in a market. They believe the coming collapse will affect only second-and third-tier firms. Even this may be optimistic. In the end, valuation comes down to one simple fact. To justify today's share prices, Internet companies will have to enjoy unprecedented growth in sales and margins. It would take average annual profits of over $1 billion to make sense of Amazon's current $20 billion-odd market value. Yet Amazon's total sales in 1998 were only $600m. The sales of many of today's Internet stars will never soar that high. If anything, the Internet will give consumers more power and make it hard even for firms with a large market share to raise their margins for long (see<DEST="SF1217.ETG" ref = article ) . And after the fall Much will depend on whether the bigger stockmarket bubble bursts too. If it does, concerns about Internet shares will be lost amid worries about the world economy as a whole. If Internet share-values topple in isolation, however, the effects might actually be salutary. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley have more money than they know what to do with. Even after an Internet crash, there would be enough wealth to back good ideas. Because current valuations have inflated what Internet entrepreneurs think they and their ideas are worth, it would become cheaper for venture capitalists to invest in them. The temptation today is to sell up and move on without having taken the trouble to build a real business. Lower share prices would force entrepreneurs to lower their expectations and restore sanity to the net's job market, in which people spend much of their day looking for employers offering juicier share options. Investment in Internet businesses would suffer only if venture capitalists lost faith in electronic commerce itself-as opposed to particular firms or the judgment of online traders. The prospect of an Internet share-bust holds a warning for other investors. Today's appetite for equities rests on an erroneous belief that they are a one-way bet: that, in the long run, they always pay higher returns than other assets. Disappointing profits are dismissed with a wave of the hand and the promise of a better tomorrow. When Wall Street crashes it is unlikely to fall so far or so spectacularly as will Internet shares. All the same, when Internet shares plunge, the screams should strike fear into investors everywhere.