Microsoft share pluge rattles bourses

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who is the largest stake owner of Microsoft, is the richest person on earth by virtue of his holding in the software giant. The fall in Microsoft share price is expected to bring down the wealth of Gates.Microsoft stock could be depressed for months in wake of a federal judge’s preliminary ruling that makes it virtually certain the software giant will face sanctions for stifling competition, analysts said on Sunday. A court-ordered breakup of the world’s biggest computer software company, while still seen as highly unlikely, became more conceivable after US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s 207-page opinion was issued Friday and backed government antitrust regulators on nearly every point.Microsoft stock fell in off-market trading after the judge’s decision and analysts said they expected it to drop 5 to 10 per cent Monday when Nasdaq activity resumes.

Bill Epifanio of JP Morgan calculated Microsoft already has under performed the rest of the Nasdaq 100 by about 9 per cent in the past month as investors have braced for the ruling.Some analysts said the ruling could boost stock of Microsoft rivals like America Online Inc and Oracle Corp. Even short of a breakup, state and federal antitrust regulators will be emboldened to seek fundamental changes in the way Microsoft does business, making a settlement improbable and setting the stage for an appeals process that could last for years, analysts said.

Cloud of uncertainty over Microsoft: Rick Sherlund, an analyst for Goldman Sachs, said the ruling was an "ominous" turn of events that will darken the cloud of uncertainty over the company, leading to renewed speculation about its fate at least until Jackson’s final decision and order, expected in February or March. "It was very clearly a rout against Microsoft," he said. "His language was harsh, and his conclusions were one-sided."While Jackson had been expected to side with the government in the crucial "findings of fact," which lays the groundwork for the final ruling and possiblesanctions, Sherlund and others said the document was even more critical of Microsoft’s business practices than had been expected. "The tone of these findings was far more negative than Iever expected," JP Morgan’s Epifanio.

Microsoft lawyers will continue to argue in court that the company has not violated antitrust laws, seizing on the few paragraphs of Jackson’s opinion that supported its defence, including a finding that its investments speeded development of the Internet and made Web-browsing easier for consumers.

But investors now can safely assume the final decision in the case will back the government, adding at least a long-term element of risk in the stock. Investors who can tolerate that risk might elect to buy Microsoft when the stock dips, reasoning that any court-imposed remedy, no matter how harmful to the company’s competitive position, will be postponed until after all appeals are exhausted, which easily could be 2001. "This is truly the early innings of a long ballgame," Epifanio said.

Bill Whitlow, a Safeco Corp mutual fund manager, said Jackson’s ruling does little to change the prospects of a company that has been under a regulatory microscope for years. "The one thing that does change is that the odds of a settlement in the case go down," he said. He argued that even if Microsoft is broken up, as some of its rivals have proposed, overall shareholder value would rise. Epifanio disagreed, saying the most widely discussed breakup scenario, splitting Microsoft into three companies for operating systems, applications and Internet operations, would eliminate technical synergies and cross-platform bundling that have helped propel its bottom-line growth.

A more radical proposal to split the company into three or four identical "baby Bills" would be "disaster – purely disaster," Epifanio said. "Nobody even knows if four Microsofts could survive," he said. But in the rapidly evolving computer industry it becomes nearly impossible to calculate how such changes will affect Microsoft after a lengthy appeals process.