The Upshot at the JPMorgan Tech Conference: the Numbers in Hand

Is It High Noon Yet?

Palm Computing (PALM Quote) CFO Judy Bruner served the shots straight up to investors.

As the JPMorgan H&Q crowd lined up its questions, one by one, she didn't flinch. She pounded down an answer and told them to drink. Demand, you lily-livered varmints, tailed off uncharacteristically in March and took another step down in April.

Instead of building from the post-Christmas doldrums in January through the spring, April's sell-through was 20% lower than January's, according to PC Data. No, pardner, that wasn't solely in the U.S., but the softness hit the same time in Asia and Europe. The same time. So a 60% to 40% domestic/international sales balance won't help them. You wanna talk components? Let's talk about the single suppliers that hooked Palm into lots of component orders last year. Palm's upped that to several suppliers, but that won't black out the pain of the up to $200 million in inventory it's going to be staring at by the fourth quarter of 2001. Palm could slap investors with another write-off, but Bruner's not giving any details. Price slashing is in effect to get rid of some of the components that already have been built into finished products, but remember that a week or two in April didn't make things right. ...