Ask Jeeves to offer 3 mln IPO shares at $9-11/shr
WASHINGTON, June 7 (Reuters) - Ask Jeeves Inc., an online question-answering service, said Monday it plans an initial public offering of 3 million common shares at $9-$11 each.
Located at www.ask.com, Ask Jeeves, which provides answers to questions from ''Is it raining in Paris?'' to ''Where can I comparison shop for cameras?'', disclosed the IPO details in an amended Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
It was amended to include more details about the offering, such as the number of shares and their estimated price range, than were contained in the company's first filing on April 30.
Based in Berkeley, Calif., Ask Jeeves also disclosed for the first time that the underwriters of the IPO have been granted an option to buy 450,000 more shares if there is big demand for the 3 million shares.
The underwriters are Morgan Stanley, BancBoston Robertson Stephens and Hambrecht & Quist. The Internet distribution is being handled by Morgan's Discover Brokerage Direct.
The shares are expected to trade on Nasdaq under the symbol (Nasdaq:ASKJ - news).
The 3 million shares in the offering represent about 12 percent of the total common shares that the company will have outstanding after the offering.
Ask Jeeves plans to use the estimated $26.8 million in net proceeds from the IPO for marketing and promotion, and for general corporate purposes, including working capital.
First introduced to the public in April 1997, Ask Jeeves, beginning with only 3,000 questions a day in its first month of operation, answered nearly 1 million questions a day in April 1999, and the number of users has grown to more than 1.9 million in March 1999 from 425,000 in September 1998.
Its two main businesses are the Consumer Question Answering Services and the Corporate Question Answering Service, introduced in October 1998 which helps companies provide a ''human-like online interface for their customers.''
That corporate service has been licensed by big computer makers Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ - news) and Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq:DELL - news), and Iomega Corp. (NYSE:IOM - news), the maker of data storage products, including disk drives, the filing said.
Ask Jeeves has incurred significant net losses in each fiscal quarter since inception, and as of March 31, posted an accumulated deficit of $9.7 million.
A 14-member group of the company's officers and directors collectively holds 56.21 percent, or 13,934,551 shares, after the offering, the filing said.
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