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Technology Stocks : NWLL -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sir Auric Goldfinger who wrote (46)	1/4/2000 4:38:00 PM
From: allen menglin chen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 265

ZDnet NWLL news. Hope you folks dump your POS AH b4 its 2 late! If they can recycle the news, I can recycle my shorts :) January 4, 2000 2:33pm 2HRS2GO: Research and China investing rarely meet By Sergio G. Non 22GO ZDII You don't even need news to boost your stock price anymore. Just put out the same press release that worked the last time. By now you probably know that shares of Australian telecom firm New Tel (Nasdaq: NWLL) are soaring after revealing plans to offer Internet service in China, build a Chinese/English portal, and issue another 11 million shares along with 3 million options. New Tel will also issue 3 million shares for the New Tel Networks stake of Xinhua Holdings, the commercial arm of the Chinese government's official news agency. Xinhua owned one quarter of New Tel Networks. Have an opinion on this? Add your comments to the bottom of this page. None of this should have come as a surprise. New Tel first made its Chinese ambitions public six weeks ago, with NWLL seeing a one-day trading spike. The company reiterated those plans in a Dec. 3 news release presaging New Tel's annual meeting. That shareholder gathering took place Dec. 13. Yet other than the aforementioned brief uptick, the company's stock has done little until today's propaganda release, which seems to indicate that traders are looking for anything to pump up on a generally down day for the market. No doubt today's rabidly capitalist NWLL buyers will be happy knowing 25 percent of their company was held by Xinhua, an organization whose latest editorial espouses these ideals for the next 100 years: "China will hold high the great banner of Marxism and Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory. It will rally round the Party Central Committee with Comrade Jiang Zemin at the core, work hard with one heart and one mind, deepen reform and promote development so as to create a still more splendid future in the new century." But why worry about ideology? As long as you're making money, who cares? Right? That theory would sound great if the company did make money. But a dozen years after New Tel was established, profits elude it. In fiscal 1999, the company lost A$5.3 million on revenue of A$4.7 million. Of that A$4.7 million, just 22 percent came from the sale of goods and services; the vast bulk of it came from government grants and something called "Structure Equity Commercialisation Fee". Ok, but so what? All Internet companies lose money. At least this one has a deal to operate in a huge market: 7 million users already for those 18 official government ministry websites forming the core of New Tel's portal, and 33 million inside of four years, projects an outfit called Security Capital Trading, and how can you not trust a research firm that promotes "Trading" rather than Investing? Anyway, you can't beat 7 million users, right? That might sound good too, if you assume the commercial Internet will never grow in China. Call me crazy, but I suspect within a few years Chinese Web surfers will find places that don't offer a steady diet of One-Heart-One-Mind. And who can say for sure how many of those 7 million users will convert to New Tel ISP subscribers? But why have doubts? It's big, it's China, it's the future. Right? Right? Other issues: ... zdii.com