Piper Jaffray plans coverage of
Amazon, AOL other 'gorillas'
By Tom Murphy, CBS MarketWatch
Last Update: 10:32 PM ET Jun 2, 1999 Silicon Stocks
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, best known for its sharp focus on mid-cap companies, plans to add research coverage of Web "gorillas" like Amazon.com and America Online.
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Analysts at the Minneapolis-based investment bank (USB: news, msgs) already cover a wide array of Net companies, including category leaders like electronic broker E-Trade (EGRP: news, msgs) and Web portal Yahoo (YHOO: news, msgs). However, the bank has so far held off coverage of some of the Internet's most highly valued, volatile and widely held stocks.
"Our core area of expertise, our area of strength, is in the small- to mid-cap range where we can really generate massive trade volume," Paul Karos, director of the firm's equity capital market division, told reporters at a San Francisco meeting.
"We can certainly do it in the large cap. We're doing it in the Dells (DELL: news, msgs), we're doing it in the Compaqs (CPQ: news, msgs), we're doing it in the Yahoos, but we don't want to use all our bandwidth and space in something that just isn't core to our business," he added. "There are going to be some companies we're intentionally not going to cover as well.."
Even so, analyst Hany Nada, who covers Internet media and technology, said he plans to soon pick up coverage of AOL while analyst Steve Franco adds Amazon to his group of e-commerce stocks. "On how we're splitting up the gorillas, there's obviously two sides -- there's the e-commerce and the e-tailer companies," said Nada. "We'll probably have a dedicated analyst for each of those areas.
"Right now, Steve and I are splitting them up," he added. "Over time, I think you'll see two senior analysts covering the e-tailing aspect and also the media. ... If you're going to do it justice you have to have an analyst focus 100 percent on those two specific segments."
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