loan facility through a wholly-owned subsidiary in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2005.

 

Fiscal 2004 Compared to Fiscal 2003:   We incurred negative cash flows from financing activities in fiscal 2004 primarily as a result of common stock repurchases.

 

In fiscal 2004, we repaid our $150.0 million senior notes that matured in February 2004. In fiscal 1998, we entered into a forward contract to sell 36.0 million shares of our common stock at $4.42 per share plus accretion, subject to adjustments over time. The forward contract had a stated maturity of February 13, 2003 and was accounted for as an equity instrument. The forward contract collateralized our master lease facility that provided for the construction or purchase of up to $182.0 million of property and improvements leased by us. In fiscal 2003, we settled the forward contract with a cash payment of $166.3 million, which was recorded as a reduction to additional paid in capital.

 

Free cash flow:   We believe reporting free cash flow provides more visibility to our ability to generate cash. We believe that this measure is also useful to investors as one of the bases for comparing our operating performance with our competitors. Free cash flow is not a measure of financial performance under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles and should not be considered in isolation or as an alternative to net income as an indicator of our performance, or as an alternative to cash flows from operating activities as a measure of liquidity. We calculate free cash flows as follows:

 

Long-Term Customer Financing

 

We offer our customers the option to acquire our software and services through separate long-term payment contracts. We generally sell such contracts on a non-recourse basis to financial institutions. We record the transfers of amounts due from customers to financial institutions as sales of financial assets because we are considered to have surrendered control of these financial assets. In fiscal 2005, 2004 and 2003, $455.6 million, $356.6 million and $364.1 million or approximately 11%, 10% and 11%, respectively, of our new software license revenues were financed through our financing division.

Contractual Obligations

 

The contractual obligations presented in the table below represent our estimates of future payments under fixed contractual obligations and commitments. Changes in our business needs, cancellation provisions, changing interest rates and other factors may result in actual payments differing from these estimates. We cannot provide certainty regarding the timing and amounts of payments. We have presented below a summary of the most significant assumptions used in our information within the context of our consolidated financial position, results of operations and cash flows. The following is a summary of our contractual obligations as of May 31, 2005:

 

We believe that our current cash and cash equivalents, marketable securities and cash generated from operations will be sufficient to meet our working capital, capital expenditure, contractual obligations and investment needs. In addition, we believe we could fund other acquisitions with our internally