Lane, re: Perot Systems (PER), in my opinion, seems to own the last horizontal B2B out there (with Time0) that nobody has yet discovered. Ariba, CommerceOne, PurchasePro, VerticalNet, and Clarus have all had their runs based on their pure-play status.
Given that list of horizontal B2B's and forced with a decision, I'd probably put the quality of Time0 roughly at par with VERT or PPRO, each valued at $4.9 and $2.9 billion, respectively (PER does not break out Time0's revs and business separately, as far as I know, so I'm working in the dark here). It's got an operating history as far back as 1997, which, for the B2B's, is pretty decent.
At $1.8 billion, the market appears to be pricing Perot Systems purely on its IT business, with very little to speak of for its B2B portion. There's talk about spinning it off or creating a tracking stock,, but my conversation with Investor Relations earlier today didn't glean any more information, as he was very tight-lipped about the subject. He did mention though that he had received numerous calls from others asking about an expected spinoff. Nowadays, the B2B spinoffs tend to have market caps far in excess of their parent companies. Take the RETK/HNCS and DZTK/PFSW spinoffs, for example. The spinoffs were roughly priced around 30-40% in excess of their parent's market caps.
There's money on the table, it seems.
Rainier |
