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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (9968)	12/9/1999 1:36:00 AM
From: Mohan Marette	Respond to of 12475

Picuture of the day ( There are wildlife sanctuaries in Kerala which provide you opportunities to watch the wild Indian tuskers. For Keralites the elephants are part of their history, tradition, myths and culture. Domesticated elephants are part of household as well as temples.) keralatourism.org

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (9968)	12/9/1999 5:18:00 AM
From: JPR	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 12475

Mohan and Ratan: Here is an excerpt on FMKT: FMKT is expected to price Thursday night and open for trading on Friday. FreeMarkets (FMKT) N/A: Few IPOs have had more going for them this year than FreeMarkets. Most importantly, there is the business model -- FMKT creates online B2B auctions of production materials. This will be the first public B2B with a pure transaction-based model. The others -- ARBA, CMRC, PPRO -- have a transactions component, but are primarily selling software licenses. When you hear the trillion dollar estimates slapped on the B2B sector for 2003, those are estimates of online B2B transactions volume. Companies that successfully take a slice of this business, even a very small slice, will do very well. FreeMarkets has a good chance of being one of those companies. Whereas current B2B leaders ARBA and CMRC focus on MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) procurement, FreeMarkets' auctions cover production materials. Setting up these auctions is not like setting up an eBay auction, where one size fits all. In the market for production materials, the buyers have specific needs and do not make decisions solely on the basis of price. These are high maintenance auctions, which has a downside in terms of costs, but a huge upside in that it is quite possible to develop customer loyalty and sustain high margins as a result. Also working in this IPO's favor is its underwriting team -- the deal is led by Goldman Sachs with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, DLJ, and Wit Capital co-managing. FreeMarkets' notable weakness is customer concentration, as General Motors (GM) and United Technologies (UTX) accounted for 58% of their business thus far in 1999, but this concentration is diminishing rapidly (was 77% in 1998) with the recent addition of new customers. The range on the IPO saw a huge increase last night to $40-42 from $14-16, highlighting the strong demand for this issue. Even at the high end of the new range, the price/sales ratio using the Q3 annualized revenue run-rate was "just" 67. Given the comparables in this sector, we wouldn't be at all surprised to see FMKT open well north of $100. And as we are seeing today with huge moves in ARBA, CMRC, ICGE, and VERT, the strength of this offering is having a beneficial effect on the entire B2B sector. FMKT is expected to price Thursday night and open for trading on Friday.- GJ 09:29 ET ******