Disclosure Bulb Burns Dimly at GE

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Generally Eluding:

Maybe that's what

GE

(GE) - Get Report

means. (Or so suspects reader John Slagle.) As I

noted yesterday on the Columnist Conversation, the company that claims it's bending over backwards to disclose

more

actually doesn't disclose as much as tight-lipped

Emerson

(EMR) - Get Report

-- at least not when it comes to monthly sales. Emerson reports its sales, like clockwork, in an 8-K report. GE, by contrast, just sends the report to Wall Street analysts.

Why not disseminate that kind of information more broadly? I tried asking that question, with my first calls Wednesday to GE at around 5 a.m. Pacific time -- to David Frail, the guy responsible for these inquiries. He was on another line so I left a message on his voice mail. I called a half-hour later, and the chief spokesman on financial matters for the company that claims to be giving disclosure a good name was then off to a staff meeting. I left a message with his secretary.

He never did call back. Must be that

this

kind of disclosure isn't what GE is talking about when it's talking about better disclosure.

Why make such a big deal about this? Because in this new world order of disclosure, GE isn't making itself as transparent (I really hate that word) as it should be, especially to investors who

don't

have access to analysts. Monthly order numbers from a company like GE can be telling. And based on what I heard from one of my spies, they were in the most recent period.

"GE's February orders," he says, "were down 15%-20% for the month. That makes the third month out of the past seven that orders were down that magnitude. This certainly does not bode well for revenue growth going forward."

Of course, we have no way to verify what he says, because GE doesn't disclose the data and it doesn't return calls dealing with the data.

And FYI: My spy on the orders is the same spy who gave readers of this column the first heads-up on

Honeywell

(HON) - Get Report

and

Tyco

(TYC)

. He, at one time or another, has been a fan of all three.

Nvidia noise:

Salomon Smith Barney analyst Andrew Lu, in almost a throwaway sentence in a report Thursday, said that

Taiwan Semiconductor

(TSM) - Get Report

expects a quarter-over-quarter decline in sales from

Nvidia

(NVDA) - Get Report

because of "seasonal" issues.

Seasonality at a growth company like Nvidia? Growth companies aren't supposed to have seasonality. Could it be that Xbox, a big part of the Nvidia story, isn't meeting expectations? That's what a SoundView analyst said yesterday, when he sliced his estimate on Xbox unit sales.

Sonus, the final chapter?

Two weeks ago the rumor surrounding

Sonus

(SONS)

was that it was

going to be acquired by

Cisco

(CSCO) - Get Report

. (Can't help but wonder who sold their stock on the ramp following that chatter!) Now the company is warning that first-quarter revenues will be about half of what they were the quarter before. With the amount of cash burned last quarter, based on what the company told investors on a conference call Wednesday, the company has only about a year's worth of cash left.

But hey, try telling that to the few analysts who, in an effort to sugarcoat the company's problems, keep saying (hoping?) that they still believe in Sonus' long-term viability. Hasn't

anybody

learned from the past?

Herb Greenberg writes daily for TheStreet.com. In keeping with TSC's editorial policy, he doesn't own or short individual stocks, though he owns stock in TheStreet.com. He also doesn't invest in hedge funds or other private investment partnerships. He welcomes your feedback and invites you to send any to

Herb Greenberg. Greenberg also writes a monthly column for Fortune.

Brian Harris and Mark Martinez assisted with the reporting of this column.