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Strategies & Market Trends : USHG - Anyone know Estimated earnings? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LORD ERNIE who wrote (391)	11/5/1999 11:49:00 AM
From: John J H Kim	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 408

U.S. Home & Garden Announces Initial Launch of Business-to-Business Online Auction Don Rutishauser Appointed as Chief Financial Officer SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 5, 1999--U.S. Home & Garden Inc. (Nasdaq: USHG - news) today announced that EGarden, its lawn and garden web site www.egarden.com, has initiated a soft launch of its business-to-business 'Auction Forum' web site. The site expects to begin generating transaction commissions in January. The `Auction Forum' site will be open to growers, landscapers, garden centers, manufacturers, and businesses. EGarden is expected to soft launch its `Wholesale Store' web site for non-auction, business-to-business transactions in January. EGarden is the first business-to-business electronic marketplace specifically for the lawn and garden industry. The EGarden electronic marketplace will help meet the existing needs of lawn and garden manufacturers, distributors and retailers by creating new channels for product distribution, affording manufacturers new opportunities to efficiently sell surplus inventory, and providing buyers with greater access to product offerings. EGarden intends to capitalize on the growing business-to-business market for all categories of products and services sold over the Internet, which Forrester Research, Inc. estimates will increase from approximately $109 billion in 1999 to $1.3 trillion by 2003, significantly outpacing the estimated retail e-commerce market. Robert Kassel, Chairman and CEO of U.S. Home & Garden, commented, ``We are very excited about our `Clicks and Mortar Initiative'. The response we have received from our industry has been overwhelming. EGarden provides USHG the advantage of globalizing sales at its Auction and Wholesale web sites. The `Auction Forum' gives USHG access to broader distribution channels and better inventory management, while sales through our `Wholesale Store' are expected to generate higher margins. We are particularly excited about the `Wholesale Store' opportunity due to the size of the market it will address. There are approximately 65,000 independent hardware, lawn and garden retailers, and specialty stores that purchased an estimated $10 billion of products; and building contractors, landscape architects, municipalities, and others who purchased an additional $9 billion of lawn and garden products in 1998. This represents approximately 40% of the total lawn and garden industry, which is estimated by the National Gardening Association to be in excess of $46.8 billion. We believe that this combination of auction and wholesale transactions on a business-to-business basis provides the greatest opportunity for success in growing e-commerce sales and increasing overall margins for USHG.'