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

To: puborectalis who wrote (36812)	12/1/1999 10:03:00 PM
From: Bouf	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108040

BOUF does loves ZD...COOL..CALY... CALY..a little play with BIG potential..FDA approval for instant AIDS testing..CHINA rumor...hmmmmm could be huge if a big Drug company likes them and their FDA approval!! Downside seems small for this under $2.00 stock....but FDA approval this week could mean big balloons!!!

To: puborectalis who wrote (36812)	12/2/1999 1:12:00 AM
From: westpacific	Respond to of 108040

ICAB - careful here. Wharf holding and heavy competition. Article CNN.com 11/26/99 -------- Is Reality Finally Catching Up with Hype in Hong Kong? Investors sniff at i-Cable's IPO By ASSIF SHAMEEN It was supposed to have been spectacular. All IPOs or initial public offerings these days are -- especially if they have even the slightest connection to the Internet, broadband and electronic commerce, or have the letters "e" or "i" attached to them. But for i-Cable, a loss-making Hong Kong pay-TV and high-speed Internet service provider, Wedenesday Nov.24 was an anti-climax. Instead of the 200% jump that a torrid tech stock could expect on its first trading day, i-Cable closed a up a lukewarm 19%. Proof that the reality is catching up with the hype? Or that Internet bubble is about to burst? Not quite. More like Hong Kong investors being smart enough to seperate the wheat from the chaff. Joining the long queue of companies re-invinting themselves as trendy "net" plays, i-Cable issued 36 million new shares to investors in Hong Kong and 324 million shares to international investors, raising $486 million. The IPO was six times oversubscribed in its home base of Hong Kong and its international portion was 14 times oversubscribed on NASDAQ. Good, but not good enough. On its first trading day, I-cable opened in Hong Kong at its IPO price of HK$10.49, and moved rather slowly. At its height on that first afternoon, i-cable was up over 55% , before settling down to close just 19% higher than IPO price. 19% up for a day isn't bad, you might say. Well, it used to be considered pretty good before the Net stock boom. Nowadays if an IPO starts at less than 200% up on the first day, investors ask if there is something wrong with company. A typical reaction might be : Were the computers working that day? Or was a high typhoon signal up in Hong Kong? No it wasn't the weather that dampened i-Cable's debut. It was the company itself. I-Cable is owned by property giant Wharf Holdings, part of the late shipping magnate Sir Y.K. Pao's empire. Wharf will retain about 81.6% of i-Cable after it sells 18.4 percent of its issued capital. Despite the reception for the IPO, the market is still valuing i-Cable at over US$ 3 billion. Still, just to illustrate how disappointing the listing was, Wharf's shares, which had been rising in anticipation of a huge windfall from the IPO, actually fell 20 cents, or 1% to HK$20.95 on IPO day. (Wharf is using proceeds from the IPO to cut its own debts) I-Cable has nearly 430,000 pay-TV subscribers, about 25% of the total homes in Hong Kong with access to cable, and about 70,000 Internet customers. The problem is the size of the market and the strength of the competition. Hong Kong has over 900,000 Internet users; i-Cable has about 70,000 of them. Market researchers expect that number to rise to an optimum of 2.2 million in five or six years. I-cable is counting on delivering Internet through high speed modems to a big portion of that. But it will be up against Rupert Murdoch's STAR TV, which has linked up with Cable & Wireless Hong Kong Telecom, as well as Richard Li's Hutchison -- another broadband player, but one in partnership with long distance telecom operator Global Crossing. Pay-TV, which had a huge churn in its early days, has stabilised at just over 400,000 mark -- i-Cable has 430,000 pay-TV subscribers -- but competition from new entrants will only drive down prices. I-Cable's IPO came just a day before Hong Kong's new Growth Enterprise Market or GEM opened for business. Many Hong Kong entrepreneurs have been looking to GEM as the fast road to fortune. I-cable's IPO makes it clear that Hong Kong punters, while they will chase good Internet stocks, won't fall for just any hype. At least many of them won't.