To all:
As I am a veteran in the field of biotechnology, I am quite interested to see how this stock will do over time. I bought a small holding in this company yesterday at around $21.
One of the hats that I wear is procurement for my lab (I am a production manager for a sequencing lab). As I am now a shareholder in Chemdex, I wanted to see if I could set up my company to purchase from Chemdex. For the types of items I order, I am most interested in saving my company money. The items are not that complex and therefore could be bought from any supplier with little regard to who provides the best quality (with what I buy, the quality is pretty much standardized so I would get the same product no matter who I buy it from). Also, we already buy many of our products from VWR so I was really interested to see what the difference was in price between buying from VWR and buying VWR products through Chemdex if any at all.
In that regard, I ventured to the Chemdex web site to see what it was all about and do some cost comparing to see if I could save my company money (and of course look good in my boss' eyes at the same time). I was bummed to find out that I needed to set up an account before I could be allowed into the marketplace where I could compare costs. To create an account, I would have had to go get approval from several sources to ensure that it would be okay to do this. All I wanted to do was see what items I could buy through Chemdex and also see if there was a cost advantage in doing so. If there was a cost advantage to using Chemdex, I would most certainly go through the trouble of setting up an account! I mean, why not? But to set one up before having any proof that it was worthwhile would be a waste of time. I also think it would be unethical, not to mention maybe illegal with me being a Chemdex shareholder and all, to set it up with Chemdex unless there was a true benefit.
I should mention that Chemdex states that there is a huge cost advantage in the time it saves using Chemdex as a one-stop-shop for all of a lab's needs. I do not think this would apply to my situation because I work for a very small company. We are a start-up with around 30 employees and I basically have all of the info I need to place orders since I buy the smae things over and over. Very rarely do I have to spend large lots of time searching through catalogs to find what I need at the best cost available. If it did take a lot of time, I can assure you all I would not be doing it. I just open an old purchase order that contains all of the info I need and change the date on it and send it off to the purchasing agent. She then places the exact order and I am all done. There would be no real time savings for me in using Chemdex so I am looking for cost savings directly from the items' price. There may, however, be a time savings for my AP department. Buying several items from one vendor would mean they would have less acounts to deal with and less checks to cut.
I emailed the company to tell then I am a shareholder and would like to get a dummy password and username so I could browse through the marketplace to see what the place was like and also see what the savings actually was. They emailed me back, very promptly I might add, saying that it was not possible to do what I asked but I would be able to do this in a little while. I think next week it may be possible (I have the email at work and I forget when they said it would be possible; may be longer than a week or it may be shorter). I anxously await to see if there is actually a difference. I should also note that Chemdex seemed to have teamed up with around 50% of the vendors that I use. The others are companies that will probably never team up with Chemdex due to their command of the market with no substitutes (i.e. Perkin Elmer) and therefore no need to use Chemdex to sell their product. It would just eat into their margins.
I think Chemdex has a fantastic idea. This business model I think will best serve large biotech. companies or labs, but I hope I am wrong, where there is a real time savings from buying most of their reagents/consumables from one vendor. I also think that there is so much competition in lab supplies/chemicals, that margins are very low. Again, I may be wrong.
I just wanted to pass along this story to you all so it would maybe add some insight into this company. Again, I am curious to see what happens long-term with this company. I noticed that VerticalNet bought out LabX today (I think this is the name) to act as an arm of VerticalNet to do exactly what Chemdex does. With CMGI and VWR as backers, who knows where we will end up. I will let everyone know what my findings are in regard to price comparisson to what I already pay. Today was great to see it have a strong close. Any preictions on where we will end up in a month?
Regards,
Sam |
