Jan, your eternal optimism is always refreshing. Keep it up.
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Excite@Home's drive for magic million
dailynews.yahoo.com
Set on pushing its number of subscribers past one million, Excite@Home has large ambitions for this year and next. But instead of sending out cable trucks to customers' homes, officials want to change the way it hooks up new subscribers.
About 620,000 people subscribe to Excite@Home (NASDAQ:ATHM - news), which offers broadband access to the Internet over cable lines. But CEO Tom Jermoluk said on Thursday that an industry shortage of trained cable installers had created a major bottleneck which prevented the accelerated rollout of the broadband services like Excite@Home.
New sales strategy
Excite@Home plans to shift a larger percentage of its sales through retail and OEM channels. Starting this fall and culminating in what Jermoluk calls "a big Christmas push," Excite@Home hopes to free its sales potential from constraints caused by seasonal supplies of trained technical personnel.
"We want much more of our business coming from retail or direct (rather) than having to have customers wait for the cable trucks to arrive," he said.
The company, which invited reporters to listen to Jermoluk and its president George Bell offer an update on the recently completed $8 billion merger between Excite and @Home, also brushed aside reports that it planned to spin off the Excite search engine.
Keith Benjamin, the senior Internet analyst with Robertson Stephens, said the 1 million target was within reach. He added that Excite@Home had been "very consistent in saying that there wasn't a lot of upside" if it failed to circumnavigate the cable installation obstacle. Jermoluk later went even further.
"We believe there's a big upside to what we can do with this transition to user installable modems and sales through OEMs," he said. Jermoluk said the company envisioned those two channels accounting for "a predominant portion" of its sales by next year.
No post-vote cable blues
Elsewhere, Excite@Home executives were still buoyant following the decision by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last week not to force AT&T to open its cable lines to Internet service providers. Critics wanted to include that provision as a condition of transferring the local cable franchise from Tele-Communications Inc. (Nasdaq:TCOMP - news) to AT&T following the merger of the two companies earlier in the year. AT&T owns a substantial minority interest in Excite@Home.
Blair Levin, a consultant who was chief of staff for former FCC chief Reed Hundt and now working with Excite@Home, said there was little appetite in Washington for requiring cable companies to share their pipelines with rivals.
"And in any event, the issue is likely going to wind up in the highest court and that's going to take another two years to get resolved," Levin said. |
