I got GRIC today when it opened. Looked like a good buy and still does. I was thinking anything under about $30 would be good. I'm comparing the market cap of GRIC ($372 million at the close today) with IBAS and ITXC, and they _don't_ compete with GRIC's main offering, which is a clearinghouse platform for global IP roaming.
Here's my untrained thoughts on why I got GRIC. Any opinions welcome.
- This got very little coverage before its IPO, which I think provided us with a much lower opening price. Hardly mentioned on the main financial sites over the weekend, and wasn't even listed on IPO.com's home page. Unlike FMKT, LNUX last week, and EGRT this week, GRIC wasn't featured on CNN, the Nightly Business report, the night, NPR, etc, the night before it opened. This meant that we didn't have to compete with thousands of rabid individual investors throwing billions of dollars at it when it opened. The down market this morning also may have held it down. Ditto the other companies that also went public today, which spread the money around.
- Management looks good, and still includes husband and wife co-founders (always a good sign IMHO):
gric.com
- They are hiring big time:
gric.com
This is always a bullish sign IMHO.
(A recent IPO I didn't buy, DMRC, only had 4 vacancies on their website last time I looked...my local Taco Bell has more vacancies than that).
- Partnerships look good:
gric.com
(although listing ORCL as a partner is possibly a bit bogus if all they do is use the ORCL database)
- They are global with strong links to Asia:
gric.com
- The network looks good:
gric.com
gric.com
- AOL and Mindspring are among recent US customers:
gric.com
gric.com
- The main story here is global roaming. As far as I know, there are no other publically traded pure-play companies specializing in this. They also sell value-added services on top of this clearinghouse of ISPs, such as internet telephony termination and VPN (virtual private networks). GRIC started out as an ISP, so I assume they know what ISPs want. I think the _hidden_ value here is the additional services they can offer to the ISPs (who then offer them to their customers) to leverage the virtual global IP network their clearinghouse represents...I'm thinking unified messaging, and so on. And (this is conjecture) but once people are accessing the Net wirelessly with their mobile devices, won't those sessions need global access POPs too?
----
Privately held competitor is ipass.com
----
Here's a Reuters piece about the IPO today:
newsalert.com
I like this bit:
""(GRIC) is showing really nice gains, but not tremendous gains," he said, comparing GRIC
to last week's explosive IPOS. FreeMarkets Inc. was offered at 48 and rose to 258 last
Friday, while VA Linux Systems Inc. , which was offered at 30, rose a record 733 percent
to 250 last Thursday."
Duh, what was he expecting. VA Linux was heavily hyped up before the IPO. Freemarkets was too. IMHO us retail investors who buy on the open market are more likely to make money on these overlooked unhyped IPOs that can be "discovered" _while_ we own them, then the "red hot" IPOs that open very high and are immediately overvalued.
Anyway, I hope this stock does OK now that I've spent so much time researching it. :) Good luck to all! |
