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To: edamo who wrote (120075)	4/22/1999 2:56:00 PM
From: freeus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

hi edamo are you being good? :o) Freeus

To: edamo who wrote (120075)	4/22/1999 3:39:00 PM
From: Dorine Essey	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

By Jennifer Shaw NEW YORK, April 22 (Reuters) - No longer clearly the biggest U.S. technology company -- nor the fastest growing by any stretch -- International Business Machines Corp. IBM.N has still found a way to recapture a market crown few had expected it to wear again. IBM stock's explosive move to the head of the blue chips on Thursday had many on Wall Street harkening back to the heady days throughout the 1960s and 1970s, before IBM's fortunes unraveled with a series of missteps, particularly in the personal computer business. IBM was up a dizzying 25-5/8 to 197-1/2 in heavy late-afternoon trading, adding more than 100 points to the Dow Jones industrial average. Its rally Thursday lacked coattails, however; the entire index was up only about 122 points. "It's all on the back of IBM," said Barry Hyman, chief market strategist at Ehrenkrantz, King & Nussbaum. "It's the whole Dow right now." Analysts thought the gain might represent a one-day best for IBM, whose officials were checking internal data on the topic. Dow Jones did not have data on whether any component of the industrials had ever matched IBM's one-day performance. Once the bellwether of the U.S. technology industry, IBM remains the world's largest computer company in revenue terms but trails Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O in market capitalization -- despite the fact that Microsoft produced one-fifth the revenues of IBM in their latest quarters. Stiil, IBM, along with Hewlett-Packard Co. HWP.N, holds a position of high visibility through its membership in the Dow Jones industrial average. The stock's surge came after IBM swept past published Wall Street expectations for revenues and earnings in its first-quarter financial results. Earnings per share of $1.55 were 14 cents ahead of the analysts' consensus estimate. The shares are worth nearly 10 times their lows in late 1993, when they dropped near 20 on a split-adjusted basis. That represented a low point in a decade that saw IBM shares tumble from peaks in 1987 that took until 1997 to completely reverse. Since then, leadership in the market and the technology sector has broadened out and companies identified with one business line, be it Microsoft in software or Intel Corp. INTC.O in chips, dominate attention. "The market is not going to live or die by one stock at this juncture," said Thomas Galvin, chief investment officer at Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette. Galvin added, "Broadly speaking, (the leadership) will remain technology, and financials...The Microsofts; the Citigroups C.N,; the Ciscos (Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO.O); the IBM's. I would put IBM as part of the picture." However, given IBM's sheer size and the breadth of its businesses -- which include hardware, software and services -- the company continues to offer a quick gauge of the broad health of the technology industry. Its size also made the magnitude of the earnings surprise that much more impressive. "There are just no superlatives to describe this," said Hugh Johnson, chief investment officer at First Albany Corp. "It's hard to imagine a company this big generating this kind of growth. Much of what has restored IBM's luster came about because of the work under Chairman Louis Gerstner to scale back and redirect the company's assets to areas like its fast-growing services business. "The transformation is now complete," said industry analyst Sam Albert of Sam Albert Associates in Scarsdale, N.Y., who is a former IBM executive. Some computer industry stocks appeared to rally with IBM, including Dell Computer Corp. DELL.O, which was up 2-7/8 to 41-5/16; but there was little joy for rival Compaq Computer Corp. CPQ.N, whose shares dipped 11/16 to 23-1/4 and whose woes appeared even more to be an individual issue after the blowout quarter at IBM. That was just one of the reasons some on Wall Street offered in rejecting the notion that IBM's results could be projected across the industry any more than when the company was struggling amid booming industry growth. "IBM is overanalyzed," said Rutherford's Brown. "People don't get the big picture, which is that it is staggering in size and it's got a management that gave the secret to Wall Street a few years ago. "They said they didn't need a new strategy; they needed to do what they were doing, but to do it better," Brown said. "And they did." REUTERS Rtr 15:25 04-22-99 Copyright 1999, Reuters News Service REUTERS Rtr 15:26 04-22-99