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Year 2000 firm looks like winner, researcher says
Forecross Corp.
Looking for rollercoaster ride?
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Mark Jurik, a California mathematician-turned-investor who researches and sells software products, is riding the hottest stock of his life.
Jurik can only hope the good times keep rolling. More than a year ago, he began buying shares of Forecross Corp., a San Francisco software solutions company, at prices ranging from $1 to $10. The Vancouver Stock Exchange shares sell now for about $11.50 U.S.
Forecross is a relative unknown in the world of Year 2000 companies, which help to fix computer problems that could wreak havoc at the turn of the millennium. Most large computers, which cannot read the code for the first two digits of a year, will confuse 2000 with 1900.
Forecross, like far larger competitors Viasoft and Peritus, develops software solutions for Fortune 500 companies. Most of these Year 2000 companies' revenues are choppy. Their stocks are not for the faint of heart.
Year 2000 stock indexes have gained about 15 percent since mid-December as newspapers and wire services around the globe write about far-reaching code problems that by the year 2000 threaten to halt air travel, monthly billings and other computer-coordinated tasks.
Forecross shares on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, known for highly speculative companies, rose as high as $25 in 1997 from a low of about $6. The surge in the Canadian shares, which are stated in U.S. dollars because the company is based in the United States, was fueled in part by speculation the company would list its shares on an American stock exchange.
No American listing . . . for now
That didn't happen, and the shares fell 50 percent from their high. Not helping the stock: Forecross restated revenues and income last year to adopt a more conservative accounting treatment of dealings with distributors.
"They have been doing software migration for more than a decade. This makes them prime candidates for Year 2000."
-- Mark Jurik
"There is quite a bit of speculation about our listing on an American exchange, but Vancouver regulations prohibit us from talking about this," said Patricia Jones, who heads investor relations at Forecross. Jones is a former American Stock Exchange executive and no relation to company President and CEO Kim O. Jones.
Jurik, a Los Aptos, Calif., software researcher, said he got interested in Forecross two years ago when he saw the company's ability to develop automated solutions for companies that wanted to upgrade computer languages -- say, from COBOL to C-Plus or Java.
"They have been doing software migration for more than a decade," Jurik said. "This makes them prime candidates for Year 2000. "They can punch out a milllion lines of code a day."
In the meantime, Forecross has been accumulating contracts with Charles Schwab & Co., NCR Corp., Kimberly-Clark Corp. and others for so-called software migration projects that transform companies' software applications or make them compatible with new databases.
Fast-growing sales but no profits
The 15-year-old company's revenues have more than doubed in the past year. Most recently, the company logged sales of $4.5 million for the nine months ended June 30 and a net loss of $60,000.
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Jones, the spokeswoman, said the company expects to unveil its performance for the year ended Sept. 30 "anytime now."
The company's Year 2000 solutions employ what CEO Jones likes to call "an automated factory" to analyze code and data and expand databases.
Jurik, who runs his own financial analysis Web site at www,jurikres.com, says the Forecross approach minimizes the risk of missing critical date fields and speeds the testing process with automated testing tools.
Jurik suggests that Year 2000 investors take a look at the Web site www.year2000.com. (For more software news, see our Software Report.) |
