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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (40475)	3/16/2001 12:45:32 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 54805

Siebel: Opportunity abounds in lousy economy Friday March 16 10:15 AM EST By Dennis Callaghan, eWEEK <<LOS ANGELES -- Siebel Systems President and CEO Tom Siebel has little sympathy for the over-financed, free-spending, profit-challenged dot-coms that are dropping like flies on the high-tech landscape or otherwise watching their stock market value evaporate. In a keynote address here Thursday morning at Internet World, Siebel said his company released its first product in June 1995 out of run-down office space in unfashionable East Palo Alto, Calif., with just $1.8 million of its employees' investments and no venture backing. But it was a "cash-positive, profitable business from the day we shipped," he said. So Siebel isn't about to panic as late-90s Internet-era companies with much less disciplined business practices go by the boards, sending the stock market tumbling with them. "What we're living through now is a market correction as the market regains its sanity," Siebel said. "There are about 80 companies operating in the eCRM space now. Fifty of them won't survive the year. Unless you can operate a profitable, cash-positive business, you won't have access to any more capital. You'll either be consolidated out or in, and the world will be a much better place." That would be more good news for Siebel as it consolidates its market leadership in every corner of customer relationship management that it operates in. "Our strategy has been and is to obtain clear market leadership in every category we're in," he said. "In every space, you have someone who has 50 percent or more of the market, someone who has 15 percent, someone who has 10 percent, and everybody else is irrelevant. We want to be in that leadership position so we can continue to generate profits in the time of a downturn." 'A bunch of bunk' Siebel blames the false dot-com boom on the over-hyping of the Internet, and he took potshots at so-called "gurus" who told companies that they would have to abandon their traditional distribution channels and embrace the Internet as the predominant way to do business. "It was a bunch of bunk," he said. "That's not the way you buy cars, that's not the way you buy insurance policies." But the Internet has certainly made an impact, he noted, as it forced companies to adopt a multi-channel distribution model. "Everything used to be so simple," Siebel said. "You'd just deploy your field sales model and force your customers to buy through it. Now and going forward, you have to do business with your customer any way the customer wants -- any time, any place, any channel." What that has created in the CRM arena is enormous opportunity, Siebel said. He pegs the CRM market at $6.6 billion with a 54 percent compound annual growth rate, one that his company is poised to exploit as its suddenly-less-well-heeled upstart competitors fade from the landscape. Siebel predicted the economy would get worse before it gets better, adding that a global recession was likely. But he said the opportunity, both for businesses that survive the challenges of the present and near future and for individual investors to snap up vastly undervalued tech stocks, was the "opportunity of a lifetime." "Absolutely we'll get through this," he said. "These are really exciting times. When it's all over, the world will be a better place. The things we're doing now will position us to accomplish things we never thought were possible.">>