FMKT Article: Walking Dead Rise with the Rest of Wall Street
biz.yahoo.com
"Naming Names
Do I have to name names and go back to getting hate mail? I am thinking about Freemarkets (Nasdaq:FMKT - news), Verticalnet (Nasdaq:VERT - news), PurchasePro (Nasdaq:PPRO - news), and Neoforma (Nasdaq:NEOF - news) in B2B, Winstar (Nasdaq:WCII - news) and Mcleoadusa (Nasdaq:MCLD - news) among the telcos.
Here's the problem with B2B in a nutshell; for a more complete discussion, take a look at the current issue of Forbes. Analysts at investment banks with stock to sell in these companies have come up with giant estimates of their market potential - for example, the sum total of all global business sales, maybe $25 trillion annually, assumed that these companies would secure a 30% share of that, and that the customers who save money by migrating to these systems will happily split the saving with the B2Bs on a 50/50 basis.
Of course the potential is nothing like this much. Many of the big players decline to play ball, preferring to set up their own B2B Web sites, as the top companies in the auto industry have just done. And companies that do join are going to want to pay a commission or a ticket charge, not a large fixed portion of any cost savings. That leaves many of these B2Bs still ludicrously overvalued. |
