Clark sees Healtheon in black by year end
By Angela Moore
NEW YORK, April 26 (Reuters) - Healtheon/WebMD Corp. <HLTH.O> co-founder Jim Clark said Wednesday the Internet health care company would have about $1 billion in revenues and be profitable by the end of 2000 if all of its pending mergers go through.
His forecast beat those of Healtheon's Chief Executive Officer, Jeffrey Arnold, who in February predicted profits by 2002.
Clark said he was confident the mergers would come to fruition for the Atlanta-based company, which is trying to link doctors, insurance companies and patients via the Internet.
Some of the bigger deals awaiting closure are with main rival CareInsite Inc. <CARI.O> and its parent, Medical Manager Corp. <MMGR.O>, as well as its acquisition of Envoy, the electronic transaction unit of Quintiles Transnational Corp. <QTRN.O>.
Health care is an enormous, fractionalized industry, Clark told the audience at Internet Healthcare 2000, an industry conference here. Healtheon took the attitude the only way to get hold of the sector quickly was to make a lot of acquisitions.
Healtheon may see competition from an online marketplace formed last month by several old-economy insurance companies, but Clark said he was not worried about the alliance.
"I don't think they are going to succeed," he said, citing the difficulty in getting competitors to work well together.
He said Healtheon will need to hold off on further acquisitions until it has meshed the technology of the firms it recently purchased.
Healtheon's share price has dropped substantially over the past several months. Clark, who recently committed up to $200 million of his own money to purchase Healtheon stock, said he was unsure why Wall Street has been pessimistic about Healtheon.
He pointed to a Barron's article that said Healtheon was quickly running out of cash. The financial paper later reversed its negative view.
Clark said he would not invest any of his own money in health care outside of Healtheon because it was an established but resistant market.
Speaking on the state of the overall technology-based economy, Clark, who was one of the founders of Netscape Communications, said Microsoft should be regulated as well as broken up.
"Any well run business will use all of the resources at its disposal to win," he said.
Netscape's software, which once dominated the Internet marketplace, was effectively crushed by Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which now holds the vast majority of the market.
15:51 04-26-00
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