ENGA a Goldman Sachs IPO The Lunchtime News
Jul 20, 1999
FOOL PLATE SPECIAL
An Investment Opinion
by Rick Aristotle Munarriz
Dis Engage?
Today, Engage (Nasdaq:ENGA - news) becomes engaged to the stock market with its initial public offering. While Internet nuptials are destined to live out rocky up and down marriages, this should prove to be one honey of a honeymoon.
Engage is in the online "cookie" business. Its high-tech bakery includes a database chock full of online user profiles from more than 30 million anonymous cybersurfers. As you enter an Engage-enabled website, it tracks your browsing habits and updates your preferences. By knowing where you've been, and probably where you're going, it becomes an invaluable tool for advertisers to effectively target their marketing messages.
Today's IPO is yet another feather in the cap for Internet incubator specialist CMGI (Nasdaq:CMGI - news) . While CMGI has been successful in taking stakes in Lycos (Nasdaq:LCOS - news) and GeoCities when they were young and profiting greatly when they went public, and in making back its venture capital investments several times over by selling subsidiaries to America Online (NYSE:AOL - news) , Amazon.com (Nasdaq:AMZN - news) and Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) , Engage is CMGI's first wholly owned subsidiary to go public.
Rather, it was wholly owned until today's six million share offering. CMGI will still retain an 82% stake in the company. It has been a hot entity in its pre-market days, with pricing set at $15 per share after initially being targeted in the $9-11 range. The heat is understandable. Even at $15 a share, this values Engage at just $700 million. That's a far cry from the $3.5 billion that competitor DoubleClick (Nasdaq:DCLK - news) is commanding.
With CMGI announcing its purchase of AltaVista from Compaq (NYSE:CPQ - news) last month in a deal valued at $2.3 billion, it poses an interesting scenario where Engage may eventually inherit the juicy AltaVista portal cookie deal that accounts for 40% of DoubleClick's sales. While DoubleClick has gone on its own buying spree (NetGravity, Abacus Direct) to help absorb the possible lost business, the Engage offering today has not helped matters much. At midday DoubleClick is off $6 15/16 to $87 7/8, while CMGI is down $1 1/4 at $100 1/4.
Granted, DoubleClick reported less than stellar earnings yesterday, but the negative sentiment tied to the relative value of Engage seems daunting. Engage's client list is already filled with big names like Dell (Nasdaq:DELL - news) , CNET (Nasdaq:CNET - news) and SportslineUSA (Nasdaq:SPLN - news) as well as CMGI-connected companies like Lycos and Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) .
In a battle of cookie monsters, Engage appears to be the one to watch. So, do you like Engage's chances? If you do, odds are Engage knew it all along as well. |
