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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Educator who wrote (19804)	2/23/2000 4:18:00 PM
From: Luce Wildebeest	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Well not exactly out of favour. This out of the Internet Stock Report. Good luck to all. Niv Excite@Home: Getting Out of the Dog House Excite@Home has built an impressive portfolio of strategic assets. Yet, Wall Street is unimpressed. Is it time to take a look? I have been using Excite@Home's cable modem service for a year and a half. While it is not perfect, the speed performance is far superior to my old dial-up account. As more and more people use the Web, they will want speed, too. What's more, the leading-edge Net technologies -- video, voice, etc. -- requires lots of firepower. Obviously, the future is broadband. In this environment, it would seem that Excite@Home (ATHM) would be a perfect investment. It is a first-mover, which has locked-up cable agreements that cover 72 million homes. Of course, there is the Excite.com portal, the MatchLogic division (which provides advanced marketing technologies) and @Work (Internet services for businesses). Yet, the stock has been a dog. Yesterday, the stock closed at $34-3/16. The 52-week low is $33. Perhaps, a big problem is that the company is a hodge-podge of assets. Thus, it can make it difficult for Wall Street to value. What's more, the legal ownership rules regarding the cable agreements are mind-boggling. But looking at the company, there are many bright spots. In the last quarter, the company made its first profit (true, it was small: $514,000). Revenues were $128.8 million, which was up from $73.3 million in the year-ago period. In all, the company has over 1 million subscribers. Keep in mind that the No. 2 cable modem service, Road Runner, has 550,000 subscribers. To help clarify the valuation of the company, Excite@Home plans to create a tracking stock that separates the company into content and broadband. Actually, yesterday Excite@Home announced a new joint venture with Dow Jones to create work.com, which is a portal for businesses (focusing on the lucrative, but hard-to-target small and medium sized business market). The venture will combine the assets of @Work and dowjones.com. Sometime this year, work.com is expected to go public. Excite@Home is a complex company and it will probably take some time for it to convince investors. But once the company is finished launching its tracking stocks and spin-offs, the picture will become clearer -- getting the stock out of its rut.

To: Educator who wrote (19804)	2/23/2000 8:14:00 PM
From: Maverick	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Interview w/ ATHM CEO by CableWorld cableworld.com CW: You're in the middle of a cable vs. DSL modem horse race. How does this handicap Excite@Home's future? Although we came to life as a stepchild of the cable industry there no limitations on how we take our network architecture and content across other platforms, like DSL, as long as we respect the boundaries of our cable partner footprints. We're actually platform agnostic, although the vast majority of our growth to date has been cable platform related. Which horse wins is of less concern to us than the supremacy of our network architecture and the value of our broadband content over multiple high-speed platforms. CW: What are your immediate priorities? The company will attempt to extend its broadband leadership position and that has implications for both the content side and the network side. On the network side, we finished the year with 72 million homes worldwide under contract. Now 24 million of the 72 million are marketable, upgraded for two-way. Recognize that 59 million of those 72 million homes are in North America. So we're not going to get a lot bigger in North America. Time Warner's gone with AOL. We have AT&T. We're about to have MediaOne. We have Cox, Comcast, Cablevision, Rogers, Shaw and 19 other MSOs plus our @Solutions company that we have which allows for the very small cable systems to get deployed on high-speed. What's left is Charter and Adelphia, and we already serve 3 million homes of Charter's through acquisitions. So most of our growth in terms of footprint will occur outside the U.S. One of the things about 2000 is it's a year of international focus. So far, our international partnerships have been with cable companies. We expect most of them would be that way in 2000. We have five joint ventures overseas right now. The second thing is we will work with our cable partners to shift the installation model to a retail model where you have DOCSIS imbedded modems in the PC. This past Christmas we were in 2,000 retail outlets. We've got agreements with H-P, Compaq, Dell and others to optimize their modem production for our service. CW: How many retail modems did you ship last year? We probably had 8,000 or 9,000 retail subscribers this Christmas. We expect 30% of our December 2000 subscribers to come from retail. And we expect the total number of subscribers worldwide to rise somewhere between 2.5 million and 2.75 million at year's-end. On the content side in 2000, we believe we are required to do two things. One is to fundamentally rethink Excite narrowband, the Excite portal - so lots of good, different functionality is there - search, chat, instant messaging, personalization. How does that get into the world of broadband in a way that preserves the speed that people enjoy broadband for, preserves the brand identity of Excite, to which we have 51 million registered users, and leverage our ability to cross-promote people from narrowband to broadband? For instance, as AT&T Cable turns you on and you're an Excite user, you have a single click to port over all of your personalization choices. That's a potent thing. That content becomes a form of marketing. That's a very dramatic move for a leading narrowband portal to commit to because you are essentially making a new version of yourself and you're doing it for a dramatically smaller audience. The company's principal form of revenue and virtually all of its profits at this point come from media, come from Excite. We do 125 million to 145 million page views a day. Broadband is still tiny. The dominant form of how people get to the Web for the next three or four years will be narrowband. So the drama of this risk is we're going to deliberately reorient our priorities to walk away from some traditional aspects of narrowband programming and cross a line into broadband programming. Now no portal competitor today has either the urgency or the opportunity that we have in doing so. Yahoo! or Lycos or Disney doesn't have these cable relationships. AOL might if the government gives them a thumbs up in a year. CW: Are we going to see more content purchases? Purely speaking, we will not buy content companies. We're not going to get into the business of owning content. We don't see any reason to own the kind of content that AOL purchased. Like owning CNN. The goal of content is to reach the largest possible audience to maximize its business model. On the day that AOL-Time Warner announced the merger, we had calls from two different content divisions of Time Warner saying : 'Hey, we still have our distribution deals with you guys, right? Your platform is twice the size of Road Runner's. Let's not quibble with what our corporate parents did today, right? We're still on, right?'