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

To: badon518 who wrote (3665)	2/4/2000 4:37:00 AM
From: Hans U. Tschanz	Respond to of 6020

Softbank trading in Frankfurt at around Euro 1330. <eom>

To: badon518 who wrote (3665)	2/4/2000 4:39:00 AM
From: Edwin S. Fujinaka	Respond to of 6020

I think that SI is stuck or something. The last Softbank note as I write is from Feb 3 at 8:50PM. Anyway, with a last US trade at $1220 (off it's earlier highs) Japan closed out the week at 133,000 yen up "only" 9000 yen (remember that the trading limits were only 5000 yen a few days ago <G>). 133,000 yen is equivalent to $1238 US. Already we are looking at a 9000 yen rise as pretty tame stuff. Frankfurt opened down a little, but still $1298 US near the open there. These stories were at Nikkei Net and suggest some really powerful forces propelling the IPO market and boding well for any new Softbank backed upcoming ipos: Thursday, February 3, 2000 Unlisted Info-Related Ventures See Stock Prices Soar TOKYO (Nikkei)--Start-up firms, mainly information-related ventures, not traded on the stock market are seeing their stock prices soar when they increase capital. Even firms less than a year old have watched in glee as prices rocket to more than 20 times their face value. Behind the fireworks are the high prices paid for stakes in Internet-related firms that have gone public and a flood of funding offers made to promising firms by domestic and overseas investors. Cybird Co., a provider of cellular phone content, will increase capital through a third-party allocation of shares to several nonfinancial companies in March. The Tokyo firm, set up in September 1998, estimates sales of just under 400 million yen for the current fiscal year through March. As the pioneering nature of the firm's products has been evaluated favorably, its stock has leaped to 2 million yen a share, against a face value of 50,000 yen. Cybird is hoping to raise 1 billion yen from the share placement. Net Web Inc., a developer of Internet-related systems, increased its capital in December by allocating new shares with a 50,000 yen face value to the Softbank Corp. (9984) group, the president of Hikari Tsushin Inc. (9435), Yasumitsu Shigeta, and others for 3 million yen per share, and raised 1.2 billion yen. The Tokyo firm plans to apply for listing on the Mothers market operated by the Tokyo Stock Exchanges on the basis of its earnings report for the year through March. Neoteny Co., provider of support services to Net-related ventures, has increased capital by 2 billion yen by selling new shares to major U.S. venture capital firms. The Tokyo company was set up last December by Joichi Ito, a well-known Net-focused entrepreneur. Based on equity holdings, the firm's stock price is estimated at around 10 million yen. In the past, when start-up firms sought to raise capital domestically, they usually issued shares at face value. Even if future potential was recognized, their stock prices never reached 20 times the face value. If start-ups can increase capital so easily through such high prices as are now available, management can raise finance without significantly reducing their share of equity holdings. Some people are expressing concern about the overblown popularity of ventures. With the huge amounts of money flying around looking for just about anywhere to land, moral hazard could emerge among entrepreneurs, leading an official at one major venture capital firm to warn that some company stock prices are too high. (The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Thursday morning edition) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday, February 4, 2000 New Issue: CJK To Go Public On Feb 15 TOKYO (Nikkei)--CJK Co. (4743), a systems integrator that handles information and data communications systems for financial institutions, will register its shares on the over-the-counter market on Feb. 15. The firm's orders plummeted temporarily in the wake of the failure of Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan (LTCB), which was its main bank, but they are recently recovering. CJK operations are roughly divided into networking and solutions businesses, which each generate 40% of overall revenue, because the firm's orders involve both hardware and software. Pretax profit slid 35% on the year to 420 million yen in the fiscal year ended March 1999 on a 10% sales decline to 9 billion yen. The slide reflected LTCB's failure and the unstable financial system in general. CJK is particularly strong in the solutions business targeted at financial institutions. It aims to upgrade this operation to boost its sales to 7 billion yen in the intermediate term, accounting for nearly 30% of overall revenue. The Tokyo company also seeks to expand its networking operations, riding the wave of increased Internet use. It took the first step in that direction last December by signing a tie-up deal with Softbank Corp. (9984) and other companies in electronic commerce. CJK forecasts pretax profit will triple from the year-earlier level to 1.26 billion yen in the current year ending March 31. Sales are expected to rise 22% to 10.9 billion yen. Initial public offering: 300,000 shares Secondary sales: 500,000 shares Offering period: Feb. 4-Feb. 8 Issue date: Feb. 14 IPO and secondary sales prices: 2,500 yen Lead manager: Daiwa SB Capital Markets (The Nikkei Financial Daily Friday edition) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: badon518 who wrote (3665)	2/4/2000 8:42:00 AM
From: astyanax	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 6020

hey badon518. Mutual funds have to be concerned about liquidity because they want to have the ability to get in and out of stocks quickly and also to have those stocks positively affect performance. When a fund gets too big, it's handicapped on those two points, which is why the only 2 mutual funds I own, JAGTX and TIFQX, recently closed. WWWFX was getting pretty big (at the time, I think it was $600-$650 mill) considering the fact that manager Ryan Jacob bought highly concentrated stakes in thinly-capitalized stocks (which are harder to trade, because there are so few shares floating around, that it would take weeks to build up or shed a full position). Ryan Jacob, on at least 3 separate occasions, said he would not consider buying a foreign stock unless it was available as an ADR (American depositary receipt, which I know nothing about). Apparently this has something to do with liquidity. Although I have a very hard time believing that a stock with a market capitalization of around $50 billion at that time was not liquid enough without the ADR. In my opinion, the liquidity issue (anyone who actually knows a lot about ADRs can chime in to debunk me here) is a red herring. If Ryan Jacob truly cared about liquidity, he wouldn't have been, by far, the largest mutual fund shareholder in theglobe.com (TGLO), a stock I've always despised. It had one of the thinnest floats out there (not to mention that it was a wildly overpriced me-too second-tier community site) and Jacob went so hog wild that when, after he left, the stock crashed, WWWFX was unable to divest its position for months. The new portfolio managers of WWWFX were pretty upset about that situation. Most importantly, I still don't understand why no Internet funds ever bought Softbank. How can they defend that behavior? How could you ignore the largest diversified net stock in the world? All these funds were paying a ton for Yahoo! and E*Trade, so why didn't they buy the same stocks at a tremendous discount through Softbank? Instead, they stuck to other foreign stocks like Gilat Satellite (GILTF), which are only moderately related to the Internet sector. Munder NetNet also thought Racing Champions (RACN) and theglobe.com were better buys than Softbank, go figure. Fortunately, other mutual funds (Warburg Pincus, Acorn, Gabelli) liked grossly undervalued Internet stock more than Internet fund managers. Maybe someday when I'm overlooking my Italian villa, I'll have a drink with friends edwin fujinaka, jay chen, and malcolm b., and we'll have a nice laugh over this. ha ha. :) - Netconductor.com >>badon518 wrote: net, i can think of many reasons, both last fall, and now, why one wouldn't want to invest in sftbf (i didn't say i agreed with them, but i am aware of them), but i don't understand the liquidity thing. i'm not a finance guy, so i was wondering if you could explain the reasoning behind jacob's problem with liquidity, even if it has proved not to be the case. thanks in advance.