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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stan s. who wrote (21065)	10/29/1999 12:39:00 PM
From: stan s.	Respond to of 108040

AKAM, ISLD...Akamai Technologies (AKAM: news, msgs) priced its initial public offering at $26 a share, 18 percent above its upward revision of its filing range. With this offering, Akamai will see its market valuation swell to $2.3 billion even though it's generated just $404,000 in sales for the first six months of this year. To get business rolling, Akamai also spent $10 million, or about 24 times its sales. Akamai is a Web content management company whose technology allows users to access Web sites quickly. The company's FreeFlow service is designed for sites that have the highest volume of traffic, such as CNN, Yahoo (YHOO: news, msgs), Infoseek (SEEK: news, msgs) and About.com (BOUT: news, msgs). Lead underwrite Morgan Stanley plans to offer 8 million shares, or about 9 percent of the total 90.4 million shares outstanding. Akamai's expected market value has investors betting that Digital Island (ISLD: news, msgs), which recently purchased Sandpiper to better compete with Akamai, could also be valued as rich. Shares of Digital Island (ISLD: news, msgs) bolted 11 1/4, or 20 percent, to 69 7/16. See IPO Report. As Digital Island's shares catapult, all the better for Sandpiper Networks, which will receive 27 million shares of Digital Island. At current prices, Sandpiper Networks, in effect, is being purchased for some $1.8 billion. "We basically had our IPO," Sandpiper Networks Chief Executive Leo Spiegel said in an interview. Billion-dollar Net babies When Akamai begins trading, it will become a new member in the '99 billion-dollar Net IPO club. With just two months left in the year, 75 out of the 230 Internet IPOs that have gone public this year, have broken that threshold, according to CommScan EquiDesk. Sycamore Networks (SCMR: news, msgs), Internet Capital Group (ICGE: news, msgs) and Juniper Networks (JNPR: news, msgs) are the only three that have stock valuations above $10 billion. cbs.marketwatch.com