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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Bid.com International (BIDS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Boolish who wrote (37491)	2/25/2001 4:12:42 PM
From: Boolish	Respond to of 37507

A few questions answered Jeffrey Lymburner, CEO, BID.COM International Conference Call Question: Can you tell us which ones of your deals are on line and which ones are coming on? Give us an idea as to what the sequence of these Valve Vision, Merchants Exchange, Cargo for less? Answer: News International has, I think, a couple of subsets up now in the UK. I think they have got sort of fired up and I think London Times.com and maybe one or two others. I do not actually have that at my fingertips. We have got GE auto financial services up, Merchants Exchange and CargoWorldwide. So there has been a steady progression particularly over the last two to four weeks. In reference to that issue, I have heard a number of people comment about the fact that there has not been a lot of news in December and then early in the New Year. The reality is, a lot of what we have been doing has been large account activities such as GE that took awhile to close. Also, we were working like crazy. Our technology team did an incredible job burning the midnight oil or getting a number of large clients up and running early in the New Year. But in some instances, the client themselves do not particularly want us to announce those happenings. Since in a lot of cases, we had already announced the deal itself because the contracts were signed, the actual implementation in some clients’ view is something that for a strategic or competitive reasons, they do not want us to release. So we are at times a little bit handcuffed there although eventually this is all public domain. It does not always warrant a news release but we have a number of those that are now implemented and live, several of which are really high quality companies that we now feel are terrific reference points for our sales people to use. Question: What will the head count growth be? Answer: It is somewhat dependent on the activity that we see quarter by quarter. But I think that it would not be, out of the line to think sort of 5 to 10 people a quarter as a rough range. Question: When you were down in New York not too long ago, you were looking for something like a 50 percent quarter to quarter growth in numbers of deals. Obviously it has backed off a little bit with the recession and yet you are still going to be able to meet the cash flow breakeven goal by the end of the year? Answer: We feel that is correct. Particularly in light of what we have seen over the last three or four months in terms of contract value and the caliber of deal we have writing. Yes, we think that actually our objectives in terms of the dollar flow are going to be well met. Question: Could you give some idea as to how the costs are going to grow from here? Is the advertising and promotion principally related to the old business to consumer and is most of the growth going to be in the G&A, what is going to grow and by how much? Answer: I think that on the consumer spend side, of course that is gone completely now. We are going to see some periods during which we are going to be spending to promote some of our newer operations. But I think that probably the biggest ramp up will be in the salaries as we add members to the team. We are pretty much building with a focus on either sales people or those in a support role, which is in direct relationship to the activity we are seeing at our customer or client level. So I think that that is where we are going to see a progressive ramp up. On the sales and marketing side, we have taken a fairly tight approach, things like trade shows and activities that can be directly related to the sales activity. Our head of marketing and business development will have a certain amount of latitude depending on the quarter and just the flow of business to determine where that money gets spent. Question: How many new deals did you do in the fourth quarter? Answer: I believe it was about six or seven. The average value was in the neighborhood of $400,000 per deal. Question: You were previously looking for a substantial growth in the total number of deals. Are you still looking for growth or do you think the quantity will stay in the same six to seven? Answer: It is really hard to tell right now. I think we could see at inch up but what we are seeing right now is a lot of activity in the large corporate and mid-sized company sector. I would not say we have abdicated the small account area but we are certainly concentrating our efforts in the medium and larger accounts to a degree we may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I would not be surprised to see it nudge upwards but at the same time really the main factor now is we are seeing some very high quality customers coming to the table. We are going to make sure we work hard to close those ones first. Question: Is there an indication that you are now going to step up the number of deals? Answer: That actually brings up an interesting point that I probably should have referenced in my earlier comments. What I think we are seeing as the result of economic times is I think we are seeing a lot of the very small and medium sized accounts backing off because they simply do not have the financial resources right now to enter into any new technology agreements. But we are certainly seeing an ample amount of activity in mid and larger accounts. So I think that what we are going to see is a transfer, at least in the next few quarters that would be fairly consistent with what we saw the last quarter. The exact number may be impossible to guess but probably not as many deals but as evidenced by, things like Valve Vision and GE, very, very high quality, good dollar deals. So I suspect that we are not going to see a rebound in the smaller company sector for a little while but I think the big companies are definitely continuing to be committed to their e-commerce programs. Question: What do you see as risks to Bid.com over the next couple of quarters? Answer: Short-term, I guess right now one of the interesting things for us is that, the risks become issues more of when, not if I think that we do not see or hear a lot and we get a lot of feedback from the client community that really intimidates or worries me as being a really prohibitive risk. The challenge will be more of executing sooner than later on plan. For instance, if we have a number of really good quality deals in the hopper in a particular quarter but maybe they get hung up for two weeks while working on the final details, and one slips into the next quarter. Those are the kinds of risks that I think are highly manageable because at the end of the day, we are going to end up in the same place. It certainly seems right now that we are in a position to acquire other than the obvious day-to-day challenges of salesmanship and so forth. The risks are dramatically reduced from what they ever were befor