Dan Niles Quotations

We believe that Intel is seeing the most front-end loaded third quarter in many years and is booked out for the quarter.

We believe that demand is now likely to exceed Intel's processor supply now through the third quarter and possibly into the fourth quarter.

We believe that Compaq also did a good job on the profitability front, which should enable operating margins to more than double from third-quarter levels ... this should lead to earnings-per-share at least several cents higher than the consensus First Call estimates of $0.16.

We remain negative on PCs and semis and believe there is still downside risk to estimates and stock prices.

We're getting to the latter half of the year. and typically, the industry sells close to 20 percent more PCs in the second half versus the first half. People are getting ready in anticipation of a much stronger second half of the year.

If the shareholders vote against this deal, it is hard to see how she will remain. In our opinion, the only beneficiaries to the current increase in uncertainty are Dell and IBM.

For those who thought the price war was aggressive, you haven't seen anything yet.

Over the past two years, AMD has increased its market share against Intel from 13 percent to 21 percent. For those who thought the price war was aggressive, you haven't seen anything yet.

Our stance has been in big enterprise applications, it was obvious that people were buying ahead to get their systems ready for Y2K. The mainframe business is a dying business, and our feeling was IBM would see it in the third and fourth quarters because the growth patterns weren't normal.

It doesn't get a lot better than that, especially for a company that just hasn't been doing very well for the last year. It's going to be good for them tomorrow, and that should have a positive affect on a lot of the other chip makers, especially guys that are closely related. It will have generally a positive affect on the overall market.

The problem is how long will it take for the fundamentals to stop getting worse, and we don't see that happening any time soon.

Though we believe Dell can outperform the Nasdaq in 2000 after a poor 1999, we believe this can only happen after expectations have been reset to more reasonable levels. We believe downside on the stock is to the high $30s. We remain on the sidelines until then.

There has been a huge run-up in price this quarter - unbelievable results.

There could be a bloodbath in pricing in the first part of next year if they don't move inventories over the holidays. The magnitude of the miss gives you an idea of what's going to happen with the PC market next year.

When you miss your top line by $1 billion, the stock should go down. With negative year-over-year revenue growth it is really hard to get excited about the stock.

It was about as good a quarter as you're going to get. They cleanly beat the numbers by about three cents.

The supply situation will likely get worse in the first half, while demand looks sluggish at best, with large inventory levels in the supply chain.

Dell reaffirmed their guidance for the third quarter, but gave no guidance going forward. They also said that industry growth for the third quarter was going to be worse than expected.

Compaq walked away from PC market share when pricing was irrational.

As a result, we believe forward EPS estimates at best will remain unchanged and most likely will need to be lowered.

The bottom line is they (Cisco) said the bottom may be one-to-two quarters out so that puts you back to firm footing with reality saying this is not over yet.

The unit growth is not so strong as to offset the price declines they're seeing in their chips.

This economy is not going to rebound any time soon. To sit here and guess where the bottom is is a loser's bet.

This is yet another data point that the general IT spending pickup continues to stretch out in time. We do not see a recovery till after the summer at the earliest and even then expect the recovery to be gradual.

They're going to get clobbered. If it's a Europe problem, that affects everybody, not just Intel.

It's easy for No. 2 to gain share when No. 1 can't deliver enough products. It will get more interesting in 2006 as Intel brings new capacity on line.

It's a disaster. They told us three months ago that Y2K isn't going to have any effect on them at all. They miss this quarter, now they're saying the next quarter is going to be even worse and that the first quarter will have even more losses.

The back half of the year looks like it will be better than expected.

Services are much more profitable than their core business.

Slightly, to my mind, implies 3- to 5-percent growth. I think most people were looking at the 7- to 8-percent range for the fourth quarter.

Their focus on the enterprise computing and global services segment produced 51 percent of total revenue and 90 percent of total profits in the fourth quarter. A continuing improvement in the mix is expected to drive gross margins to almost 25 percent next year from 23.5 percent this year.

I'm surprised it was this good, quite honestly. And more importantly the guidance for next year on the gross margin line of 57 percent. I think people are going to be very encouraged given that's up pretty substantially from what they did this last year.

Intel sees no signs of a pickup and would not call this quarter the bottom for revenues. We do not think the bottom will be reached until the summer, at the earliest, and remain cautious on the stock.

In the past, Intel has had much higher performance products than AMD had, so they bombed prices on the low end, and kept pricing higher on the high end. This time, AMD's got as speedy processors as Intel does at the high end. There's nothing Intel can do. They can't bomb prices without hurting themselves.

Cisco's inability to reduce its inventory after the October quarter when revenues grew 14 percent quarter over quarter and inventory grew by 59 percent quarter over quarter reaffirms our view that we have not yet seen the worst of the inventory correction for semiconductor suppliers.

The magnitude of the problem is what caught most people off guard.