Tuesday August 8, 9:29 am Eastern Time
Press Release
ProNetLink.com Adds New Management Bench Strength and Financial Muscle
Former Eximbank Chairman, John Bohn, Named Chairman of the Board of Directors, President and Chief Executive Officer
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August 8, 2000-- B2B Internet Entrepreneur, Karen Morgan, Named Senior Executive
Vice President Chief Operating Officer and a member of the Board
of Directors
New Funding from Founder, Jean Pierre Collardeau
At a press conference today, Jean Pierre Collardeau and Glenn Zagoren of ProNetLink.com (OTC BB: PNLK - news), the Global Trade Internetwork(TM), announced the addition of two seasoned executives to the company's leadership. Effective immediately, John Bohn is Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of the company, Karen Morgan is named Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and a member of the Board of Directors.
Glenn Zagoren will remain as Co-Chairman and as Executive Vice President will continue to build international Government and business relations as well as focus his attention and energy on accelerating the development of the new PNLTV.com broadcast unit. Jean Pierre Collardeau, the founder of ProNetLink, will continue as an active member of the board, and as Executive Vice President for Strategic Planning, contributing his advice to the company on its international expansion.
Additionally, David Blumberg, a financial consultant to the Company, has been appointed to the board, and David Walker, who has served as the Company's Chief Operating Officer, will be assuming the duties of Chief Information Officer.
Mr. Bohn has served as the President and Chairman of Export Import Bank of the United States, as CEO of Moody's Investor Service, and as United States Ambassador and Executive Director of the Asian Development Bank. He was formerly Executive Chairman and co-founder of CheMatch.com and is presently Chairman of the Center for International Private Enterprise, a director of the United States Chamber of Commerce, and is a principal and board member of GlobalNet Venture Partners, a consulting and investment firm which provides management, market focus, and capital to start-up enterprises and to companies seeking to transform themselves into the world of the Internet.
Ms. Morgan is co-founder of CheMatch.com, the first business-to-business Internet-based chemical exchange. Karen Morgan also is the founder of T3 Technologies, and PetroChemNet, one of the first Internet-based professional business communities a$400 billion segment of the chemicals market. Karen Morgan pursued the vision of a web-based B2B exchange from the concept stage through to revenue generating business and in June 1999, PetroChemNet Holdings, Inc. acquired CheMatch.com, combining for the first time the information resources platform with the trading platform. Ms. Morgan is also a principal and board member of GlobalNet Venture Partners.
Karen Morgan observed that ``these additions to the executive team will enable ProNetLink.com to expand its offerings, scale and establish global strategic partnerships. These additions will position the company as the premiere B2B infrastructure player for SME's globally.''
``John Bohn's management experience, credentials and sterling reputation in the international business community combined with Karen Morgan's vision and proven track record in the Internet space will provide PNL the kind of focus and capability that are needed to take maximum advantage of the new technologies to move the company and global trade to the next level,'' said Zagoren. ``This unique combination of in-depth experience in the Internet B2B and international trade arenas is an unusually good complement to Jean Pierre's vision, David Walker's industry experience, and my execution skills,'' said Zagoren who expects further additions to the company's management team in the next few weeks. ``It permits ProNetLink to maintain its position as the leading provider of web-based export and import services to small and medium sized companies throughout the world,'' said Zagoren.
``I have been watching with enthusiasm what ProNetLink.com has been building, and I am looking forward to working with the highly motivated staff to move PNL aggressively to meet the challenge of the new international trade environment,'' said Bohn. ``Our primary short-term objectives include finalizing second level funding, adding significant strategic partnerships, accelerating the growth of the company, and building out the full complement of user services.''
``The greatest challenge of any rapidly growing company is the transition from the start-up stage to the scale-up stage,'' said Collardeau. ``John Bohn, Karen Morgan, Glenn Zagoren, and David Walker have the proven skills required to transform an entrepreneurial vision into an enduring, revenue-generating business.''
Collardeau used the occasion of the press conference to announce he has provided an additional one million dollars of funding to the company. ``I am very confident in the future of ProNetLink and that we have the right people in the right place at the right time,'' Collardeau said.
Today's press conference was broadcast live on the ProNetLink.com and PNLTV.com sites and is archived for on demand viewing at www.pronetlink.com and www.pnltv.com.
Ambassador John A. Bohn
John A. Bohn served for 7-1/2 years as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Moody's Investors Service; the world's leading credit research and analysis company, and a major publisher of financial information.
Mr. Bohn also served a 4-year term as President and Chairman of the Export Import Bank of the United States, a U.S. Government corporation that finances and insures the sale abroad of American produced goods. During his tenure, Eximbank provided some U.S. $6-8 billion per year in loans, guarantees and insurance in more than 25 countries.
Prior to his service with the bank, Mr. Bohn was Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, and later U.S. Ambassador and Executive Director at the Asian Development Bank in Manila. In addition to practicing law in California and the Pacific, Ambassador Bohn spent 13 years as an international banker with Wells Fargo which included 4-1/2 years in Tokyo, with responsibility for Asian activities, and later as Division Manager for trade financing, private banking, and multinational banking efforts.
A graduate with honors from Stanford University, Mr. Bohn attended the London School of Economics as a Fulbright scholar, and then studied law at Harvard University. A member of the California State Bar and the Foreign Service Association, Mr. Bohn serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Center for International Private Enterprise in Washington, D.C, Chairman of Monotech International, a global building materials company, and managing director of Lange, Mullen, and Bohn, a global financial advisory firm. He is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations, a trustee of The Monterey Institute in California and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Mr. Bohn is also a Director and member of the executive committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and a Director and co-founders of GlobalNet Venture Partners.
Karen Morgan
Widely regarded as a business-to-business Internet visionary, Karen Morgan is best known for co-founding the business-to-business chemical exchange, CheMatch.com. In her position as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, she was instrumental in attracting top management, strategic investors and venture capital, including Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE: CSC - news), DuPont (NYSE: DD - news), Battery Ventures, and others.
In 1995, Morgan founded T3 Technologies to build online virtual communities for a number of major U.S. corporations and was one of the early leaders in developing industry-specific online Internet/intranet and extranet solutions for business.
Building on those early commercial applications, Morgan transformed T3 into PetroChemNet, an online community for the petrochemical industry, in 1997. One of the first Internet entrepreneurs to understand the key roles of partnerships in building successful Internet business models, Morgan convinced traditional publishers of the value in re-purposing their information assets around a web-based community of interest and providing analytic tools to permit participants to interact with the information.
The growth and development of PetroChemNet, one of the very first ``Professional Business Centers,'' laid the groundwork for PetrochemNet's acquisition, in 1999, of Houston based CheMatch.com, an online exchange specializing in the trading of bulk commodity chemicals. Combining PetrochemNet's information resources and tools with the transaction-based CheMatch.com produced the present CheMatch.com in 1999, the world's first online exchange for the purchase and sale of bulk commodity chemicals.
Ms. Morgan is a frequent speaker at CEO forums and conferences including those sponsored by Industry Standard, Red Herring, Salomon Smith Barney, Center for International Private Enterprise and a number of other industry-related eCommerce seminars. She serves on the advisory board to Internet Capital Group's eB2B Marketplace World and acts as an advisor to several entrepreneurial eCommerce initiatives. Ms. Morgan is also a co- founder, and director of GlobalNet Venture Partners; a consulting and transformational investment firm focused on the expansion of global marketplaces.
David Blumberg
David Blumberg was the first employee of Wit Capital, Inc. and most recently served as the company's Senior Vice President and Managing Director. Before that Blumberg was Senior Vice President of Merrill Lynch Interfunding, Inc. and Managing Director of Merrill Lynch and Co., Inc. Blumberg headed Blumberg Associates, Inc. providing advisory services to middle market companies.
About ProNetLink.com
ProNetLink.com offers a frictionless e-commerce solution for global trade. ProNetLink's web site (www.ProNetLink.com), called the Global Trade Internetwork(TM), is an online, interactive webtool(TM) where small to medium sized businesses can work within the site to arrange all areas of global trade including procurement, logistics, finance, insurance, product certification and much more. Seasoned professionals or newcomers to the world trade market can use ProNetLink.com to identify business opportunities that will help increase revenues, as well as take advantage of tools and resources that will enhance operating efficiencies. ProNetLink.com offers a horizontal trade services solution for vertical e-based businesses around the world. Currently the ProNetLink.com Procurement Directory contains over 3.2 million companies from 122 countries.
About PNLTV.com
ProNetLink.com also features www.PNLTV.com, the Internet's first global trade news broadcast network. PNLTV.com broadcasts a live newscast Monday through Friday at 11:00 a.m. EST featuring current global trade issues, interviews with government and international business leaders and reports from correspondents from around the world. PNLTV.com also offers in-depth coverage of special events such as the United Nations, U.S. Department of Commerce, WTO Meetings and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. All PNLTV.com broadcasts are archived for viewing at anytime. PNLTV.com is free to viewers and can be accessed through the ProNetLink.com home page or by visiting www.PNLTV.com.
For more information, please contact ProNetLink.com, 645 Fifth Avenue, Suite 303, New York, NY 10022 Tel: (212) 688-8838, email: info@pronetlink.com.
ProNetLink.com is publicly traded on the NASDAQ exchange OTC Bulletin Board: PNLK (PNLK.OB).
The ProNetLink.com logo and Global Trade Internetwork are trademarks of ProNetLink, Corp.
This release contains, in addition to historical information, forward looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which reflect ProNetLink.com's current judgments of those issues. However, because those statements are forward-looking and apply to future events, they are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause the Company's results to differ materially. |
