NBCi - NBC Internet Tracking Stock
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Tale of Two Tracking Stocks
By Adam Lashinsky
Silicon Valley Columnist
7/21/99 7:00 AM ET
So Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq) isn't creating a tracking stock for its Internet operations. Yet.
But don't think for a second the tracking-stock concept is dead. All Microsoft CFO Greg Maffei said after the company's earnings Monday is that it isn't "imminent." The plan to create a stock tied to Microsoft's Internet operations that would have the value of a "pure-play" Net company remains a way for Microsoft to attract wampum-hungry employees. After all, they want a shot at getting as rich as their Microsoft predecessors did.
And plenty of other corporate titans are moving ahead with tracking stocks, most notably General Electric (GE:NYSE). GE last week quietly filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission that show just what the first pure play carved out of a true blue-chip will look like.
The new concern is called NBC Internet, or the cute NBCi for short. Based in San Francisco, NBCi will be the combination of consumer-oriented Web services firm Xoom.com (XMCM:Nasdaq) (whose stock and CEO will become NBCi's stock and CEO when the deal is done), portal Snap.com and four Net properties belonging to GE's NBC television unit. The other partner involved is CNet (CNET:Nasdaq), the computer-information site that jointly owns Snap.com with NBC.
There's a lot that looks impressive about NBCi, particularly that GE's grand poobah, Jack Welch, and NBC President and CEO Bob Wright are on the new unit's board. (Unlike Network Associates (NETA:Nasdaq) CEO William Larson, neither Welch nor Wright helped themselves to any NBCi stock options, according to the company's SEC filing.)
Even more impressive is that NBC has been running its Internet operations like something resembling a business. The three primary NBC contributions to NBCi -- network portal NBC.com; NBC-IN.com, the aggregate sites of more than 100 affiliates; and on-demand video programmer VideoSeeker -- are actually profitable. Grouped together as the NBC Multimedia unit to be rolled into NBCi, these three earned $838,000 in the first quarter on revenue of $3.5 million. NBC's fourth contribution to NBCi is a 10% stake in the cable television channel CNBC, which includes the month-old CNBC.com, a mighty spiffy-looking competitor to TheStreet.com.
The other participants in NBCi surely will cure NBC of its profit-making urge. The overall entity, if it had existed at the end of last year, would have had revenue of $27.8 million and an operating loss of $290 million. And NBCi's red ink isn't slowing. First-quarter losses grew to $88 million on sales of $13.3 million, according to the SEC filing.
With Xoom.com's current market cap of $736 million, its proposed 37% stake in NBCi values the as-yet-nonexistent company at almost $2 billion.
That's a neat feat for NBC, of course, to turn a few million bucks in revenue into a billion-dollar investment. NBC will hold 48.5% of NBCi, with an option to own as much as 53.8%. Another goodie for NBC is the $880 million in advertising NBCi has promised to purchase from the Peacock over 10 years.
That latter arrangement is reminiscent of the way Motorola (MOT:NYSE) hedged its bets on Iridium (IRID:Nasdaq) by taking a big stake but arranging for the fledgling global satellite network to buy its gear from Motorola.
As Herb Greenberg's ongoing coverage of Iridium makes clear, sometimes even hedged bets don't pan out. |
