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

To: LOGAN12 who wrote (3473)	1/24/2000 2:45:00 AM
From: Edwin S. Fujinaka	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6020

Looks like Softbank and Yahoo Japan are up the limit tonight. Actually they show Softbank up 5100 yen to 90,100 yen or $859. I think there were no sellers for a time. There was an interesting story on Yahoo Japan in the Nikkei Net Weekly Section: Issued: January 24, 2000 Investors soar on Yahoo's fortunes Share price tops 100 million yen in record-setting run-up; overall market for online advertising doubles in a year The share price of Yahoo Japan Corp. momentarily topped 100 million yen ($952,000) last week on the over-the-counter market, the first time a Japanese equity had been valued so high. It was just one year ago that the company, registered for trade on the over-the-counter market in November 1997, saw its share price top 10 million yen. The latest event indicates how much hope market players pin on the Internet search-service provider. Yahoo's share price (50,000 yen face value) hit 101.4 million yen in the morning on Jan. 19 on the OTC market as investors bought Internet-related stocks. However, Yahoo's stock declined after that, finishing the day at 97.4 million yen, down 2 million yen from the previous day's close, due to investors' satisfaction at having achieved the 100 million yen share price, analysts say. "The online advertising market, which is expected to have doubled in 1999 from a year earlier, will continue its expansion," predicted Masahiro Inoue, the firm's president. Growth in online advertising will mean an increase in profit opportunities for Yahoo Japan since the estimated number of monthly users of its search site is 9.8 million, about 50% of the Internet browser market. Online advertising debuted in 1996. The market, which was then worth 1.6 billion yen, is projected to have topped 20 billion yen in 1999, even though it accounts for only 0.4% of the total Japanese advertising market. According to a leading ad agency, the ratio of online advertising to total advertising in the U.S. has surpassed 2%, while in Japan it is expected to be about 1% in 2000. Growth in the online ad market could help boost the profit potential of Internet firms since the profit of these sorts of companies tends to increase dramatically after sales rise above a certain level. Yahoo Japan's pretax profit soared 420% year on year to 584 million yen in October-December 1999, while sales grew 210% to 1.61 billion yen. Yahoo Japan's billings stood at 3.8 billion yen in 1999, accounting for 15% of an estimated 25 billion yen online ad market. Maintaining a share of the growing market will be indispensable to the company. The more an Internet search service's content increases, the greater its presence. Yahoo Japan is trying to maintain its user level by offering the content and service users want. It launched an auction service in September last year partly to achieve this objective. As many as 180,000 items have been put up for auction. Bids average 60 million yen a day, and the ratio of successful bids stands at 80%. To expand the scope of its portal, Yahoo Japan now provides auction services and news content covering 23 fields, while Yahoo! Inc. of the U.S. covers more than 50. Yahoo Japan sends task forces to the U.S. company to acquire the necessary know-how to introduce new technologies and services. The strength of the company's growth is also supported by the availability of management resources in the U.S. Yahoo Japan announced Jan. 14 it will absorb community site operator GeoCities Japan Corp. and content distributor broadcast.com Japan KK in a bid to strengthen its portal by adding new services. U.S. access provider America Online Inc. has won an overwhelming victory in the portals battle by securing about 20 million subscribers, some 40% of Internet users. In Japan, which has no such giants, Yahoo Japan most resembles AOL. But as Internet users in Japan total only about 18 million, "there's not much point in discussing the outcome of the fight over portals now," said Kazuo Yoshida, president of Lycos Japan Inc., the operator of the Lycos search engine. Online content and search services are not only provided by Lycos and NTT-ME Information Xing Inc.'s "goo," but also by Japan's largest Internet access provider, Nifty Corp., and NEC Corp. The difference between them in services has been narrowing. Yahoo, which has so far taken the lead thanks to its name recognition, must now work on attracting new Internet users to its business.