Rodent Regatta

If you can get behind the numbers and peel away the 20-40 year depreciation schedules for outdated equipment, the flakey ”swaps” that inflate revenue and the slow-thinking management styles that pervade legacy telecos, a value can be found. The need for communications isn’t going away. There may always be a debate about copper, wireless, fiber, coax, cable TV, teleco, satellite, etc., but somewhere in all of the debate is a monthly number that consumers and businesses will pay for their communication needs. Once those numbers are estimated, some additional estimates of intrinsic value exist. No one is certain where the bottom is in either the slump in demand or the free fall of market caps, but value exists down here somewhere. It certainly appears that value is closer today than it has ever been! Can these companies go to $0.10 a share? Sure, but by that time they’ll be sharing such doldrums with an awful lot of other industries.

Telecommunications Issues Fall Sharply. Investors in the troubled telecommunications sector stepped up their pace to the exits Monday. The hardest hit were Qwest Communications and WorldCom. By Barnaby J. Feder. [New York Times: Technology]