tekboy,
You mentioned the daunting task of doing the research and following that up with the analysis. Maybe I can offer some tips that might be helpful.
Determining the leaders: Find a publicly held company. In this case you might want to start with Premier Technologies (PTEK), though I wouldn't touch the company with a ten-foot pole because I distrust their management. Read the list of competitors cited in their 10K. Look up the competitors' 10K and get a feeling of which companies are listed as competitors in everyone's 10K. Those are the likely leaders.
To really nail the leaders down, determine which of those are public. Look up the annual revenues of each and list them in descending order. That gives you the publicly held leaders but you need to keep an eye on the privately held ones in an emerging industry.
Now that you know who the leaders are, research each and every one of them like crazy. When I researched the front office software industry a few years ago, I started with the ten companies with a minimum of X revenue. I read the details of every 10K and listed the major customers, major partners, and one-line bios of the management team with special emphasis of managers whose past had been on the management team of companies while in hypergrowth.
The above takes a LOT of time. Personally, I think spending the same time on learning everything about four gorilla candidates in four different industries discussed in this thread will be time much better spent. But if everyone did that, we might not know about the front office, next generation memory, laser surgery for eyes, etc., etc., etc.
--Mike Buckley |
