The market's shift away from growth and toward bargain-basement stocks doesn't faze Tom Pence in the least.

Pence, manager of Strong Enterprise fund (1-800-368-3863), invests in companies that he believes could become leaders in the fastest-growing industries. Here are four rapid growers he favors.

Gemstar-TV Guide International (GMST). Gemstar, says Pence, is the 800-pound gorilla of television guides. These include not just print publication TV Guide, but also electronic guides used by cable-TV systems, satellite television and services such as WebTV and AOL TV.

"This is a market whose growth can only accelerate because, I think, TV will become the portal of choice for the Internet," says Pence. Using what he considers conservative assumptions about future revenues, Pence says the stock, recently $52 a share, is worth $80 to $100.

Juniper Networks (JNPR). Juniper, a maker of high-speed Internet Protocol (IP) routers, has captured 30 percent of the market in just five years. Its products are geared toward telecommunica-

tions-services providers, which spend some $70 billion on capital equipment. An increasing proportion of those expenditures, says Pence, will be for the IP networks that Juniper serves.

At $93, the stock sells at a lavish 44 times rapidly growing revenues in 2000 and 88 times estimated 2001 earnings of $1.06 per share. But Juniper could easily top earnings and revenue estimates for this year, and the stock could appreciate threefold to fivefold over the coming year, says Pence.

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Waters Corp. (WAT). A supplier to the biotech industry, Waters is the world's largest maker of high-performance liquid-chromatography (HPLC) and mass-spectrometry instruments, which are used to separate mixtures into their individual components.

The technology is needed for manufacturing drugs, and Waters should benefit from the exponential increase in biotech products and the growing number of existing drugs that will soon be available to generic-drug makers, says Pence. At $72, Waters sells at 53 times Pence's 2001 earnings estimate of $1.35 per share.

XO Communications (XOXO). Formerly Nextlink Communications, XO is a competitive local-exchange carrier (CLEC), one of the market's most bedraggled sectors. But unlike the CLECs that compete with the local phone company, XO seeks to become a full-service provider of local and long-distance voice, Internet and data services.

Pence says XO, founded by wireless veteran Craig McCaw and headed now by alumni of MCI and Nextel, is one of only two CLECs that won't need cash infusions through 2002. Recently at $20, the stock is worth $60, Pence says.

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