Ex-Microsoft CFO steers new biz to negative revenues

Is Greg Maffei giving it away?

By James Watson • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 23rd October 2001 17:24 GMT

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Canadian fibre optic network services provider 360networks has posted Q2 results announcing it has negative revenue of $63 million (down from $158 million in positive revenue in the same period 2000).

It attributes this abysmal performance to its renegotiation of a number of "dark fibre optic contracts ... Revenue of $102 million that was previously recorded on a percentage of completion basis will now be reversed".

It gets worse for the already bedraggled company. It reports a gross loss of $172 million for the quarter, but once it takes into account various additional expenses, taken provision for "asset impairment", some reorganisation costs, as well as provision for bad debt, we arrive at a net loss of $5 billion for Q2 (primarily due to its asset impairment charge of $4.4 billion).

So, it lost $5 billion dollars on minus $63 million in sales? It must be hard to be that good at losing money.

It gets more interesting when one notices who the CEO is of this particular outfit, the one and only Greg Maffei. Yes, this is the man who guided Microsoft, as its CFO, into a series of cable and telecoms investments. Interestingly, MS is currently feeling the heat as it writes off $1.24 billion in cable and telecoms investments.

The Reg is eager to see what fantastic achievements he's going to pull off next. ®