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Technology Stocks : Softbank Group Corp -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: astyanax who wrote (3462)	1/23/2000 5:02:00 PM
From: LOGAN12	Respond to of 6018

Has anyone here ever tried to buy anything from Buy.com? I have bought and have tried to buy numerous times, only to be completely frustrated. That is one messed up site. It's just sloppy and I do not have faith it in unless they clean up their act in a big way. Now, compare that to Amazon's "one Click" shopping, and they get it. There is no comparison. It makes me very nervous to see the position Softbank has taken here. I hope they even know what they are getting into. I'm one of those people who looks to moves in companies "signs" that get me thinking. This one doesn't. Does anyone here know when they will have earnings? I already understand about "earnings" for incubators. It was brought up earlier ,and it's a good question. linda

To: astyanax who wrote (3462)	1/23/2000 7:29:00 PM
From: Edwin S. Fujinaka	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6018

BUY.COM has a strategy that explicitly includes selling everything at "cost" if I recall correctly. I have purchased several items there myself including about a dozen CDs in one order a month ago. The CDs seem to be dribbling in one at a time at the end of the order, but that is ok. Their prices for CDs was noticably lower than CDNow at the time I checked. This strategy for generating volume while losing money seems to have become expected for all of these internet retailers. Nevertheless they command multi billion dollar IPOs and market caps. I think that BUY.COM will be no exception and will zoom at the IPO time providing that Amazon has not cratered in the meantime. That IPO has to be soon, however. The standard talk about rapidly increasing revenue for several quarters plus the strong backing by Softbank should insure a strong IPO in my opinion. It's unfortunate that Softbank is not better known in the retail stock investing community or these Softbank backed IPOs would be even stronger performers (if that is possible <G>).I think the Japanese IPOs of Softbank companies has been better than for the US companies. This formula to riches that involves an IPO of an internet company that is increasing revenues and losing money probably still has a little more time to run. The car selling company that Amazon "bought", Greenlight.com is familiar to me since I almost bought a car from them when they only had one State (indeed one city) on their roster. I eventually went with Carorder.com because they had already found the right color car and could deliver to my front door (which they Successfully did). Carorder.com lost about $1000 on my deal and they wound up paying the dealer, Scottsdale Lexus the $1000 directly. In addition, they paid to ship the car via flatbed truck right to my front door. I'd guess that they had additional expenses so that it probably cost them between $1500 and $2000 to sell me a car and book $40,000 to their revenue. At that rate they are losing 5% of sales on each deal, and that may be better than Amazon is doing. Someone told me that Carorder is planning an IPO later this year. Greenlight initially offered to beat Carorder by $2000 and I believe they would have actually honored the deal. I just decided not to fly to North Carolina to pick up the car even though I could have saved part of the sales tax (the 2% city tax) by buying the car out of State. I therefore passed up about $2800 in total savings over the Carorder deal. A week later, Greenlight had adjusted their price and was very close to Carorder. By then, they had found out that the Lexus dealers were not discounting the RX300 very much and certainly not down to invoice like many other dealers. A few months earlier, Cardorder went through the same situation and delivered a few RX300s at invoice before they discovered that the dealers were not discounting to that level for this particular car. My big worry about the stock prices for internet stocks is that Bezos (Time's Man of the Year) and Amazon represent the internet to many investors. If Bezos is losing money at a faster and faster rate and if he needs new financing soon, the end of the ride could be near for Amazon and perhaps for many of our other internet stocks. I hope Bezos can pull it off, but I am concerned. Very concerned. All of these guys are not going to make up "the difference" in advertising revenues. A publisher can sometimes make up for some of his production costs via advertising revenue, but no way can he make up for losses incurred through selling everything advertised in his magazine (or other media) at cost or below. Sales tax savings can offset shipping costs for some high dollar items, but not for books or CDs sold one by one. Bezos knows this and is trying to branch out into other areas, but high end electronics seems to be the most likely place where online retailers may have an edge via sales tax saving.