Arnie Berman Quotes (27 Quotes)

There's no unilateral belief about tech stocks. People are confused and somewhat justifiably.

Technology stocks that were once valued on a price-to-possibilities basis are now valued as if history no longer matters,

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.

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,

The best news this year has been great reactions to bad news,

LBO candidates have several characteristics in common healthy businesses, stock prices that reflect little respect, stable cash flows, and potential catalysts to still higher cash flows (cost cutting, asset sales, etc.),

This marriage of Hewlett and Compaq that's finally been allowed to be consummated reminds me a lot of what would happen if there were a union between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.

Sun has not gotten its cost structure under control and is more of a strategic muddle.

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.

One week does not a capital markets make.

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,

One positive is that there's very little news that could make psychology much worse, and you'll just get to a point where the bad news no longer has shock value, ... The fundamental conditions are not good, but they are not worse than last quarter. We won't have that disappointing a quarter. The growth of tech is about to turn positive.

So far it looks good. It looks as though IBM is the company that has the right solutions set for some time now.

You've had a narrow group of tech companies that have been delivering positive and accelerating growth characteristics and money tends to get concentrated in those few companies that are doing that.

It looks like we'll have the third period in a row where revisions to estimates are positive. And top-line growth rates, which were negative for a while, will be positive for the third period in a row and will be higher than we saw in either December or March.

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.

Linux promises to fulfill the promise made by Unix a decade ago -- a truly cheap, powerful and entirely open computing architecture, ... Sun is digging in its heels fighting the trend. As a result, no self-respecting CIO will say she or he wants to do more business with Sun.

A lot of the best news is associated with the PC industry. Intel has been not just a bellwether in the sense that it's big, but in the sense that technology as an industry has returned to positive year-over-year growth rates, and technology as an industry tends to be delivering more upside surprises than downside surprises these days. Intel started to do that earlier and more substantially than the rest of technology.

The key question is whether or not business that's not getting closed is representing postponed business or forgone business, ... The anecdotal evidence is indicating that business is probably postponed.

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.

Software companies have a nasty habit of doing so much of their business in the last moments of the quarter that they typically only confess once the quarter has come to a close.

The first quarter was so brutal for technology spending that even IBM missed the number and chose to lower the bar. But here you have an example of a company that's very big and whose results were not, in any respect, worse than expected.

This recent wave of merger news provides some of the strongest evidence yet that companies are willing to do some long-term planning. The kind of deals getting announced not just bolt-on acquisitions but transformational deals,

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.

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.

If Oracle, when it came to crunch time in February, had a tough time getting new business, then companies whose crunch time is this week will have a tougher time still.

The latter stage of an economic recovery, where head count is rising and productivity is starting to fall, is the best for technology spending, and that's where we will be in 2006. Business leaders start thinking more about technology and less about questions like capacity expansion or how long the recovery will last.