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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pancho Villa who wrote (3960)	3/3/1998 11:50:00 PM
From: Lazlo Pierce	Respond to of 18691

Seems Like the guys who have a big stake in Lycos are smart enough to know when to say when.... ********************** SNOWBIRD, Utah, March 3 - CMG Information Services Inc. is seeking to sell about a third of its 42 percent stake in search engine Lycos Inc., David Wetherell, chairman and CEO of CMG - an investment and direct marketing company - told MSNBC at a conference. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿLYCOS, ACTING on behalf of CMG, has hired investment bank Wasserstein Perella to handle the transaction. CMG is seeking to align Lycos with a major media company in a deal that Wetherell estimated could be worth $80 million. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿWetherell said the goal for Lycos is to find a strategic partner that could bolster its content and could also benefit from receiving some of Lycos' traffic. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ"We may or may not do something," Wetherell said, "it's got to be a strategic fit." ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿWetherell said talks with "every major media company you can think of" have been ongoing for about two weeks. He declined to name the other parties to the talks but said there was a great deal of interest from major media companies in making an investment. He added that the buyer could get a seat on Lycos' board of directors. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿWetherell made the comments at plaNET.wall.street, an Internet investment conference sponsored by investment bank Hambrecht & Quist. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿIf a transaction happens, industry observers say it could spur other combinations of search engines and major media companies. Indeed, the stock of search engine Infoseek, the fourth-most visited search site after No. 3 Lycos, surged last fall on rumors of merger talks with Time Warner. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿSo far, the only major investments by leading media companies in search engines have been Softbank Corp.'s early investment in Yahoo!, the top search engine, and America Online's more than 10 percent stake in No. 2 search engine Excite. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿExperts say it could make sense for more traditional media companies to align with search engines. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿSearch sites are among the most trafficked areas on the Internet. But increasingly they are driving traffic as acting as "Web portals" that supply information and content in addition to search services. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿMany major media companies, in turn, have struggled to build anything close to the dominant share of readership or viewership in cyberspace that they enjoy in the physical world. A deal involving Lycos "could spur interest from both sides" - traditional media and search engine companies, said Paul Noglows, an analyst with Hambrecht & Quist. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿThe search engine field Company Current price Employees Market capitalization 1997 revenues* EPS Infoseek Corporation (SEEK) $16.63 113 $368.0 $34.7 -0.15 Excite, Inc. (XCIT) $47.75 191 $734.4 $50.1 -0.47 Lycos, Inc. (LCOS) $40.50 137 $597 $22.4* 0.01 Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) $72.94 155 $2,900 $65.4 -0.03 Figures in millions ÿÿÿMost recently reported quarter.ÿÿÿ**7/96-7/97 Data provided by Microsoft Investor ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿA sale of Lycos shares could be a windfall for CMG, the Framingham, Mass.-based company that acquired 80 percent of Lycos in 1995 for $2 million. CMG later If a transaction happens, industry observers say it could spur other combinations of search engines and major media companies. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿreduced its stake by taking Lycos public in 1996, by spinning off Lycos shares to CMG shareholders and by selling additional stock on the market. CMG currently has a cash balance of $30 million, Wetherell said. It plans to use proceeds from a sale of Lycos stock to make additional investments in start-up Internet companies. ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿSeparately, Sabeer Bahtia, head of free e-mail service Hotmail, said that Microsoft owned company plans to introduce a beta version of an instant message service next month. The so-call friends service will compete with similar offerings from America Online, Yahoo! and Israel-based Mirabilis. He added that Hotmail now has 13 million e-mail accounts and expects the total to rise to 25 million by year end>. Dave

To: Pancho Villa who wrote (3960)	3/4/1998 6:45:00 AM
From: Pancho Villa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18691

Looks like the bad news are starting to show up accross the board thestreet.com Evening Update: Vivus Warns; Motorola to Cut Workforce By John J. Edwards III Senior Markets Writer 3/3/98 8:24 PM ET A light menu of post-close news for your Tuesday-evening enjoyment (earnings estimates from First Call): Vivus (VVUS:Nasdaq) warned that it expects to report a first-quarter loss and said competition with Pfizer (PFE:NYSE) might also hurt its second- and third-quarter results. Pfizer is bringing an erectile-dysfunction treatment to market this spring, competing with a Vivus product. The six-analyst consensus estimate calls for a first-quarter loss of 3 cents per share versus the year-ago profit of 27 cents. Motorola (MOT:NYSE) said it would cut about 220 of the 1,100 jobs at its Albuquerque, N.M., facility. The plant makes ceramic components for radios, cellular phones and other electronic products. American Home Products' (AHP:NYSE) Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories unit said it is withdrawing its new-drug application for the blood pressure drug Verdia, citing safety concerns.