Present for you, John, from Briefing
Intraware (ITRA) 38 +1 1/4: After a successful IPO in February, which the stock race from its offering price of $16 to a high of $52 3/8 in early April, shares of this leading IT e-Marketplace for Web-based software and services beat a hasty retreat back to the low-20s, high-teens. In fact, stock spent better part of 7-months confined to a 10-point range (20-30). All that changed a few days ago, however, when ITRA exploded through resistance at 30 on a big increase in volume. Stock has benefitted from the market's love affair with anything B2B related. News that ITRA's customer base nearly doubled over the past couple of months, hasn't hurt either. Company now has 5,927 customers, with an average transaction size of $16,000. Street also applauding ITRA's actions to expand their service offerings to corporate customers via recent acquisitions of BITSource and Internet Image. ITRA's strategic partnerships with tech giants Hewlett-Packard (HWP), Macromedia (MACR), Novell (NOVL) and Siebel Systems (SEBL) drawing attention as well. Finally, company opened more than a few eyes when it reported a much narrower than expected Q2 loss (-$0.17 v. -$0.39) on a 134% jump in revenues. Though Briefing.com doesn't see B2B procurement stocks such as ITRA enjoying the same kind of meteoric growth potential of the B2B horizontal and/or vertical plays such as Commerce One (CMRC), Ariba (ARBA), VerticalNet (VERT) and Purchase Pro (PPRO), the upside still looks darn good relative to the overall market. ITRA expected to post average annual earnings growth of 40% over next five years versus about 7% for the S&P 500. Given technical breakout, strong management team, expanded client base, exciting long-term growth potential, and group strength Briefing.com expects stock to waste little time in establishing a new all-time high. -- RW
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