Arnie Berman
Arnie Berman
applied capital evidence ibm improvement issues larger last month problems rest services slow tech today transfer
HP's problems with services are not uncommon. IBM has had issues like that, too, of late. The larger problem with tech today (Friday) and in the last month has been that improvement in semiconductor capital equipment, like Applied Materials, doesn't transfer over to the rest of the tech sector. While tech fundamentals are turning, the evidence of that has been slow coming.
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The outsize rally in the publicly traded debt for companies in this sector suggests that the bond market is sending a signal that the communications equipment sub-sector is particularly attractive at present relative to other technology sub-sectors,
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When stock prices are rising, companies have conviction about stability in the near-term and are more willing to take on the risk of acquiring something,
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IBM was one of many companies that were good at managing expectations in a period where investors were conditioned to expect earnings surprises.
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IBM is one of these big bellwether companies where their business is so solid that in a year like 2001, where everybody was missing, IBM never missed a quarter.
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Companies in the technology sector are clearly overcapitalized and they are going to be increasingly forced by investors to make decisions about their cash,
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In the late '90s investors believed that tech was such a great secular growth story that cycles didn't matter. In this rebound, the only thing that matters is the economic context.
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In the midst of the mania there were a whole lot of companies that went public that were just pure plays on the willingness of businesses to throw money at new projects, ... Now that a lot of these companies have had difficult times, it makes sense that there would be consolidation.
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So far it looks good. It looks as though IBM is the company that has the right solutions set for some time now.
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The Intel numbers were actually in line with the whisper numbers, so the content is not so surprising, but the context is excellent, when you look at what happened in the quarter.
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Clearly there are a lot of industries in tech that are just begging to be consolidated. So the question is not whether the pace of M&A picks up in 2005 but whether it will represent a breaking of the dam.
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In terms of the kind of hurdle that Microsoft and IBM have to leap over, the kind of growth they have to deliver is not as significant a bar as it is for Intel.
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Any technology spending recovery follows a simple principle: things that are easiest to do without come back last,
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The best news this year has been great reactions to bad news,