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Strategies & Market Trends : Market Gems:Stocks w/Strong Earnings and High Tech. Rank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nokomis who wrote (57946)	8/26/1999 10:52:00 PM
From: kendall harmon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 120523

AGIL So much for a sleepy IPO market on Friday. Four companies -- Agile Software (Nasdaq: AGIL), LookSmart (Nasdaq: LOOK), and MyPoints.com (Nasdaq: MYPT), and Lionbridge Technologies (Nasdaq: LIOX) -- vaulted into the trading arena Friday with initial public offerings worth an approximate total of $230 million. With investors clamoring for bargains, market offerings turned into exercises in strategic placement as underwriters shaved offering prices, trimmed the number of shares to be offered, or decided not to issue at all. For example, with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (NYSE: MWD) acting as the lead manager, the San Jose, California-based Agile Software offered 3 million shares of common stock at $21 each. Even at that price, expensive for current offerings, the stock opened at $45.50 and leaped to a high of $55.25 before coming to rest at the close with a quote of $39.88 on 6 million shares traded. Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown and Hambrecht & Quist acted as comanagers of the offering. The price might have seemed rich in this dicey market until one looks at the deep-pocketed institutional players who like the company. According to Agile's prospectus, "... Mohr, Davidow Ventures and Sequoia Capital own 33 percent and 20 percent of the company, respectively." Mohr Davidow (MDV), the Menlo Park, California, venture firm, includes two of the most well-known heralds of business-to-business enterprising -- Bill Davidow, who wrote Marketing High Technology and coauthored Total Customer Service and The Virtual Corporation, and Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing The Chasm and Inside The Tornado and coauthored The Gorilla Game. In keeping with the published MDV philosophy of investing in "founders who have identified impressive market opportunities," Agile develops and markets so-called "product content management software." That is, software that allows companies to collaborate via the Internet by interactively exchanging information about the manufacture and supply of products and components. Agile's suite of software products is designed to allow all of the members of a manufacturing supply chain to communicate with one another about new or changing information concerning the manufacture, source, or supply of products or components. The company also provides services (about 40 percent of sales) including consulting, implementation, support, and training. Outsourcing production is geared toward creating supply chains that are more efficient, dynamic, and flexible than vertically integrated manufacturing operations. Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR) estimates that business-to-business e-commerce is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion in 2003, accounting for more than 90 percent of the dollar value of e-commerce in the United States. In order to garner a significant share of that market, Agile will have to turn around the last reported net losses of approximately $11.4 million for the full year 1999, on revenue of just over $16 million. As of April 30, the company had an accumulated deficit of approximately $26.5 million. redherring.com