I gotta look at the fundamentals not the MO-MO on IMAA, because of my belief, false as it may be, the market will correctly value stocks with the exception of temporary aberrations. At one time Auctions houses were all the rage, you had companies coming out of every direction calling themselves the next EBAY.
Well that was last year, and the abundance of new auction houses by major players Yahoo and Amazon, have left the also rans in the dust. IMAA as a company is in terrible shape, but does own a majority stake in a fully spun off entity called buyingedge.com.
Buyingedge.com is currently a prototype site, with a 15-20K registered users, with a lesser number of actual order placing customers, if any. Buyingedge has gotten funding but this funding can not be used by the IMAA.
So that leaves us with two questions:
1. How will IMAA profit form buyingedge
2. When would anything happen
3. What is the underlying benefit of the products.
1. I would say the only way for IMAA to truly benefit form knowledge is for them to IPO and sell their stake in the public company. Other benefits are going to be simple short-term price changes.
2. buyersedge would have to IPO and that is 1.5 to 2 years away. Stock like USAT have run up a bit within a months of TSCMs IPO but the overall value of the stock was not changed very much. Regardless the benefit to IMAA is just a far off potential, they will have to fend for themselves.
3. Will buyersedges product be useful. To that I believe NO. Why? Buyeredge attempt to have customers find or post a selection of consumer goods and then send them out for bid, upon return of bid the buyer can either choose the product or go away. Let's take a laser copier for example, could be a computer or camera or supplies, what have you. So I select the product and then the vendor replies in the next day, I then need to make arrangement to purchase. Slow and time consuming.
What is offered today to compete with the buyeredge product.
1. Warehouse clubs. Fast immediate and unbeatable prices anywhere.
Limited product selection to be sure.
2. Local specialty chains. Such as Office Depot Compusa Target, Circuit City etc etc. These general have the specialized selections, quick access, and reasonable prices. It is doubt full that any local vendor would be able to beat the prices even if the access was via Internet. Perhaps a few bucks, but remember that things break and returning to a real store is way easier the mailing back goods.
3. The most obvious significant competitor is the every prevalent "lowest-price-mutli-vendor-searchengines" examples like pricewatch.com and computershopper.com and CNET.com all have low price search engines. I see no way that buyingedge will be able to beat or even match the lowest prices and speeding return time to goods are available and at the right price.
Bottomline is that the Buyingedge.com concept for business is terminally flawed, and will not be viable, nor do I think they will amass enough users to be IPOible.
Summary, IMAA will not benefit from buyersedge.com for many years, IMAA is failing now, and Buyersedge.com is so flawed in concept that it will never be an IPO.
But that is fundamentals and not MOMO stuff, I agree MOMO stuff ruled today, but eventually and soon the fundamentals will be the key.
IMO anyway
wolff |
