To: Caxton Rhodes who wrote (26884 ) 4/13/1999 1:55:00 PM From: Ruffian Respond to of 152472
From Briefing.com> INDUSTRY FOCUS Ratings Key: 1. Outperform 2. Slightly Outperform 3. Average 4. Slightly Underperform 5. Underperform. A split rating such as 2/3 refers to short-term/long-term and is used when there is a particular short term influence of note. Revisions Key: Date of last revision; N/new, +/upgraded, =/unchanged, -/downgraded TELECOM EQP......2.......4/13........(=) Comment: Our opinion hasn't changed as the overall prospects for the industry remain excellent given explosive growth in the Internet and the concurrent demand for increased bandwidth on the part of traditional service providers. Rapid growth in the small-office/home office (Soho) market, the convergence of voice, video and data and growing demand in underdeveloped foreign markets should also help drive steady double-digit earnings growth for the foreseeable future. In a marketplace where earnings growth is scarce, we expect investors to continue paying a sizable premium for the growth potential provided by several of the component issues. Prospects for consolidation (due in part to the merger activity in the telecom service group) and more stable economic environments in the Asian and Latin American regions provide additional incentive to investors to pay up for these stocks. That said, we are noticing a more distinct schism between the haves and the have nots, with three companies emerging as the dominate players in the group. They are Lucent, Nortel Networks and Tellabs. Some of the mid to small sized firms such as Aware (AWRE) will do fine in their respective niche markets, but we expect most of the outperformance to come from the big three as customers prefer the one-stop shopping and superior service these firms provide. Second and third tier players threatend not only by competitive pricing climate but by R&D demands, short product life cycles and speed to market challenges. So while a number of secondary players could continue to find the going tough over the intermediate- to long-term, the more heavily weighted large-cap players should manage to lift the performance of the overall group above that of the market. Consequently, we are maintaining our 2 rating. Stocks: ADC Telecommunications (ADCT), Advanced Fibre Communications (AFCI), Andrew Corp. (ANDW), AtHome (ATHM), Aware (AWRE), Ciena (CIEN), E-TEK Dynamics (ETEK), General Instruments (GIC), Lucent Technologies (LU), PairGain Technology (PAIR), PictureTel (PCTL), Qualcomm (QCOM), Scientific-Atlanta (SFA), Teligent (TGNT), Tellabs (TLAB) and Uniphase (UNPH).