>>I, too, dislike AMZN very much.<<
Actually, I don't dislike Amzn. It's the stock price that i feel uncomfortable with. So that's why I choose to eat away @ this over-fed pig.
In the meantime here's some news on the "Thing".
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SEATTLE, April 13 (Reuters) - Internet book and music retailer Amazon.com said on Tuesday it would open its largest distribution center so far, in Coffeyville, Kan., to reduce shipping times to cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and Minneapolis.
The existing 460,000-square-foot facility will be expanded to more than 750,000 square feet -- more than 17 acres -- this year, the Seattle-based company said. The center is expected to begin operations during the second half of this year.
"This facility is so large that we can stock an incredible number of titles ready to ship right away," said Jimmy Wright, Amazon.com's chief logistics officer.
In January, the company announced that it obtained a 322,560-square-foot facility near Reno, Nev. In November, 1997, the company opened a 202,000-square-foot center in New Castle, Del., outside Philadelphia. The company's Seattle distribution center has 93,000 square feet of space.
Located in southeast Kansas, the facility was formerly occupied by Golden Books. It will be leased by Amazon.com but terms of the lease were not disclosed.
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Washington, April 13 (Bloomberg) -- Money manager David Dreman acquired a 10.93 percent stake in Borders Group Inc., a bet that brick-and-mortar book stores will ultimately hold their own against online rivals such as Amazon.com Inc.
Investors have shunned shares in Borders, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, because the nation's second largest bookseller hasn't plunged into Internet selling as quickly as Amazon and Barnes & Noble Inc. As a result, Borders shares have declined more than 50 percent during the past year.
The decline prompted Dreman Value Management LLC to begin buying Borders stock this year, and the money management firm held 8.42 million common shares as of March 31, according to a Schedule 13G filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Nelson Woodard, Dreman Value's managing director, said investors have exaggerated the online threat to bookstores.
Amazon.com ''has not really gained a tremendous amount of market share,'' Woodard said. ''Too many people enjoy the experience of browsing in bookstores.''
That this type of thinking is contrary to the current views on Wall Street shouldn't be surprising: Dreman is a contrarian who specializes in out-of-favor stocks. As of Dec. 31, 1998, the largest holdings at Dreman Value included 9.97 million shares in Philip Morris Cos. Inc., now trading near a 52-week-low; and 6.17 million shares in Bank One Corp., which is emerging from a recent slump.
Dreman Value
Based in Jersey City, New Jersey, Dreman Value has about $7 billion of assets under management. Dreman, a 62-year-old native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, writes a column for Forbes Magazine while John Dorfman, a Dreman vice president, writes a column for Bloomberg News.
Borders shares also are trading near their 52-week-low, even though the company's earnings for the year ended Jan. 24, 1999, increased more than 14 percent to $1.12 a share. Barnes & Noble, the nation's largest book retailer, trades at 32 times estimated earnings compared to 13 times estimated earnings for Borders.
''This is an opportunity for us whose price-to-earnings ratio is below its growth rate,'' Woodard said. Borders earnings per share over five years are expected to grow 19.3 percent annually, according to I/B/E/S International, which surveys profit forecasts by analysts.
Barnes & Noble shares command a higher price multiple because the company has pursued Internet sales more aggressively than Borders, according to analysts. Its online sales totaled $70.2 million for the year ended Jan. 30, 1999, compared to $4.6 million at Borders.
New York-based Barnes & Noble outspent Borders on advertising for its Internet operations last year, including banner ads at Web sites run by companies such as America Online Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. Barnes and Noble also packaged its Internet operations into a separate company, barnesandnoble.com Inc., that recently filed for an initial public offering.
Driving Superstore Sales
In contrast, Borders is positioning its Internet site as a way to drive sales at its superstores. The company later this year will set up Internet kiosks in its stores that let shoppers order books online.
Just yesterday, George Mrkonic, the vice chairman of Borders, said that 85 percent to 95 percent of industry sales in the long-term will come from traditional stores. He added that increasing Internet sales at Borders won't necessarily increase profits.
''Our strategy is to use the Internet to enhance the store experience,'' said Marilyn Horn, director of investor relations at Borders. ''We are building the Borders brand.''
Dreman has bet on the latter approach, and up until now, his track record has been pretty good. The five-year performance of Kemper Dreman High Return Fund, managed by Dreman Value, ranked 25th out of 226 large-cap value funds at the end of March, with an annualized return of 22.11 percent, according to Morningstar Inc.
For the near-term, Dreman and other investors might have done better owning Barnes & Noble shares, according to Mark Mandel, an analyst at ABN Amro Inc. who currently rates Borders shares as a 'buy.' ''But over a longer period of time there is more of an opportunity with Borders.''
Borders shares rose 5/8 to close at 15 7/16. Barnes & Noble shares fell 11/16 to close at 37.<<
>> London, April 13 (Bloomberg) -- Shares in London Pacific Group Ltd. almost doubled after U.S. investors discovered several private internet companies in which it holds stakes plan to issue shares to the public.
London Pacific, a fund manager formerly called Govett & Co., leaped 187 pence to 406.5.
''We've invested in a number of interesting internet companies as a part of our venture capital strategy,'' said Company Secretary John Grimes. ''We generally take stakes in these companies if we think they'll go public within two years.'' He declined to comment on specific holdings.
The company's American Depository Receipts surged 52 percent yesterday on the Nasdaq. That's after some investors found out that a number of companies held by London Pacific's California- based venture capital subsidiary, Berkeley International Capital Corp., recently filed Initial Public Offering applications with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Investors hope these holdings will jump in value when they start trading. Internet-related companies that recently went public in the U.S. have seen their new shares soar. Iturf Inc., the online unit of clothing retailer Delia*s Inc., tripled in value on their first day of trading April 10.
A rash of small internet companies have gone public recently, prompted by gains in companies such as Amazon.Com Inc., which has jumped as much as 1173 percent in the last year.
Yesterday, shares of the U.K.'s largest high street computer retailer Dixons Plc rose 8 percent after it announced it is considering selling shares in its Freeserve internet service.
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Seattle, April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc., the Internet's biggest retailer, said it will buy closely held LiveBid.com for an undisclosed amount of stock, to expand its new auction business with live events.
LiveBid.com, based in Seattle, broadcasts auction houses' events live on the Internet, which allows online customers to cast their bids along with traditional bidders. Its Web site has been used for events including the auction of O.J. Simpson's estate and the Kruse International Scottsdale Classic Car Show, one of the largest collector-car auctions in the world.
The purchase is the latest move by Amazon.com, also based in Seattle, to attract more visitors to its site and capitalize on a fast-growing and profitable form of online commerce. Amazon.com's auction site, introduced two weeks ago, directly competes against top Web auctioneer eBay Inc.
''The online-auction industry is becoming much faster paced with Amazon.com in the game,'' said LiveBid.com's chief executive and co-founder, Matt Williams. ''To have access to 8 million potential buyers that have already bought online and are credit- card-enabled is great.''
Amazon.com has been adding items such as music CDs and videos, and buying stakes in other online companies, in a push to become the dominant Web retailer. It started as an online seller of books in 1995.
The retailer has said it plans to offer more than 800 different categories of auction items, with ''tens of thousands'' of different items available. It generated about $610 million in sales last year.
LiveBid.com plans to broadcast between 130 and 140 auctions this year, up from more than 40 last year, Williams said. The company declined to disclose how much revenue it generates.
The purchase of LiveBid.com is expected to close by June 30, Amazon.com said.
The Amazon.com auction service is similar to eBay's, which acts like an online classified-ad page, bringing together buyers and sellers. It doesn't handle any inventory, which lowers costs and boosts profit.
Ebay has 2.2 million registered users of its service, with 1.8 million product listings, analysts have said. It generated $47.35 million in revenue last year.
Amazon.com's shares rose 1 9/16 to 184 7/16 in late trading. <<
>>New York, April 12 (Bloomberg) -- BEA Systems Inc., the largest developer of so-called middleware software, expects sharp gains in sales and earnings because of booming electronic commerce, said Chairman William T. Coleman.
Last week, Hewlett-Packard Co., the No. 2 U.S. computer maker, announced a $100 million, three-year alliance with the maker of middleware, software that connects two different applications on a computer network. Middleware allows customers to use electronic shopping carts at online retailers such as Amazon.com Inc. to make orders and give billing information.
The alliance ''makes our software the basis'' for H-P's electronic commerce, Coleman said. Over the next two years, San Jose, California-based BEA and H-P plan to devise at least 30 ''kits'' that will use BEA software for different applications, from logistical software to stock trades.
''As corporations have to do business-to-business E- commerce, they need an infrastructure like ours,'' he told the Bloomberg Forum.
As a result of the H-P agreement, Coleman said, ''we certainly are comfortable'' with a profit forecast of 2 cents a share, the average estimate of nine analysts surveyed by First Call Corp., for the fiscal first quarter ending April 30.
''Middleware sits on top of a network and guarantees that applications won't break down when systems break,'' Coleman said. That means the software has to run on all kinds of computers, from advanced servers to desktop PCs, and handle diverse requirements.
Coleman said BEA's biggest rival in middleware is International Business Machines Corp., the world's biggest computer company, although his company has ''three times their market share.''
Acquisition
To extend its reach to programmers using Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java Internet programming language, BEA last year acquired closely held WebLogic Inc. in a stock swap valued at about $192 million.
Now incorporated as BEA WebLogic, the acquisition is paying off, said Coleman, 51, a former Sun executive who co-founded BEA in 1995. Amazon.com, the No. 1 online bookseller, signed up to run all its online applications, he said.
Other BEA customers include E*Trade Group Inc., the No. 3 online brokerage, as well as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Sears, Roebuck & Co., respectively, the No. 1 and 2 U.S. retailers, Coleman said.
Previous acquisitions of other companies' network software led to customer wins, the CEO said. For example, BEA acquired an advanced financial software package called TopEnd from NCR Corp., the No. 1 maker of automated-teller machines, and merged it with Tuxedo, which it had acquired from Novell Inc., one of the top network software developers.
That helped BEA win more business from Wal-Mart, an H-P customer that recently announced a program to allow suppliers to track their inventories in its stores over the Internet, he said. <<
>>CHICAGO, April 13 (Reuters) - George K. Baum & Co. analyst Dean Ramos said Tuesday he initiated coverage of Internet bookseller Amazon.com Inc. with a neutral rating based on the stock's valuation.
Ramos says in a report he estimates a loss of $0.92 per share for 1999, a loss of $0.32 per share for 2000 and a profit of $0.04 per share for 2001.
Says the company has emerged as the clear dominant online specialist, with fourth quarter sales of more than $250 million.
"While profitability remains elusive, Amazon has been prolific in growing its revenue base to a run rate of $1 billion from just $148 million in 1995," Ramos says.
Amazon shares up 3-1/16 at 187-1/2 in morning activity on Nasdaq.<< |
