Here's a bullish case for SEEC, in case anyone is interested:
The total Y2K market is huge, perhaps as big as $600 billion. How much of that market will SEEC get?
According to a 2/97 article in The Street.com -- back when SEEC was selling for $8 per share -- the original SEEC Y2K product is well-regarded:
>>>industry rags like PCWeek, ComputerWorld and Enterprise Systems Journal gave Seec's COBOL Analyst 2000 3.1 rave reviews.<<<
Plus, SEEC just released another Y2K product that appears to be groundbreaking. According to the same 2/97 article in The Street.com:
>>>The most exciting news, however, is an as-yet-unnamed product that handles both Y2K analysis and conversion. Best of all, this product works on PCs operating Windows 95 and Windows NT, so companies don't have to hire hard-to-find mainframe gurus to operate it. William Ulrich, president of the Tactical Strategy Group, a Y2K consulting firm, says this product could prove to be the best Y2K solution yet. "There are a lot of tools that find the code, but there just aren't a lot of tools that change code," he says. "This Seec product does both and it looks very, very good. It's easy to use, point and click on the PC, and I think it really goes much further than any of its competitors."<<<
That product, Smart Change 2000 -- the first PC-based tool for automating Year 2000 date conversion -- was released in October.
According to an 8/97 article in the Street.com, lots of people have already lost money shorting SEEC:
>>>Shorting Seec (SEEC:Nasdaq) was that kind of mistake. Not too many people were that dumb -- Seec had fewer than 25,000 shares of short interest as of last week -- but the short position was half that size in June. Now those poor fools who were short are getting crushed: In the last two days Seec is up 33%, closing Wednesday at 23 3/8 on heavy volume. All this on the heels of a stunning earnings number.<<<
The "stunning earnings number" was the August, 1997 quarterly report, when earnings shot up to 13 cents per share. Here's what The Street.com had to say about that report:
>>>But then came Tuesday's earnings. The number was shocking. Seec reported revenue of $2.4 million, up from $452,000 a year earlier. And the company reported net income -- of $649,000, or 13 cents per share, up from $18,000, or 1 cent a share, a year ago.<<<
>>>As CEO Ravi Koka tells it, the news is even better than those numbers. "As our tools get accepted in the marketplace, we expect our prices to go up," he says. "Gross margins this quarter were up to 76%, from 58% in the previous quarter and 48% in the first quarter last year. Our strategy initially was not so much to concentrate on the price, but to get the people signed up, get the products accepted, get the training, get the productivity numbers in place. Now that we've started to do that, we expect to announce a price raise very shortly."<<<
Finally, it appears that SEEC is thinking past January 1, 2000. Again, from the 8/97 Street.com:
>>>Best yet, analysts and investors seemed to like Koka's strategy of going after end users of Y2K tools -- the companies and computer technicians who have to go into billions of faulty date codes and change the numbers so their computer files will work after Dec. 31, 1999. This is a distinct market to focus on: One of the biggest developments in the field are "Y2K factories," organizations that will take a company's computer files into a sweatshop full of programmers who dissect and repair code. But Seec is looking beyond 2001, when such factories will begin to run out of Y2K work -- and stop buying any Seec products, Y2K or otherwise. Koka is focusing on the companies and users who could keep Seec afloat for years to come."Our concentration has been on strengthening end user sales, because this provides long-term value, builds our customer base and also provides us with a post-2000 strategy."<<<
Anyone have any information that contradicts that bullish scenario? |
