Covad beat market trends and analyst projections on Wall Street with its
200,000 digital subscriber line subscribers, it was announced Tuesday.
That puts Covad 30 percent above projections, due mainly to a combination
of operations savvy and low expectations by Wall Street and market analysts
of the popularity of DSL, according to Robert E. Knowling, Jr., Covad
chairman, president and chief executive officer.
“Meeting this goal shows that Covad’s fundamental are solid and we scaling
our business as expected,” Knowling said. “We have the largest, strongest
independent business in the DSL market, demand continues to be high and our
direct and indirect channels are selling our services well, creating record
order months. Our back office is a machine cranking out installations and
our marketing department is focused on selling value-added services to
businesses. I am confident that we are on track to meet our targets for
the quarter.”
For a while, the announcement halted Covad’s plummet in stock
value, which fell below its 52-week low of 11.875 per share to 10.609 at
press time. But by the end of the day on Tuesday, Covad closed down 2.09 or 18 percent to 9.91. It’s a sign of Wall Street’s trepidation in Covad’s business model, which is rapid deployment to become first-to-market and acquiring subscribers on the fly.
Nick Kormeluk, Covad senior vice president of investor relations, said the
CLECs operations capabilities is more than keeping up with network
deployment, and that company’s stock value will rebound.
“Our focus from the beginning is on operations and our ability to scale our
operations to meet the network deployment,” Kormeluk said. “That and our
Operations Support System, which lets us support our customers without
having to manually connect the subscriber to a DSL line.”
“Our stock has been under pressure today, but the news today helped it
rebound, bringing it up $1 per share after the subscriber numbers were
released,” Kormeluk said.