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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: H James Morris who wrote (12518)	8/4/1998 8:11:00 AM
From: John Ke	Respond to of 164684

Aug 4 1998 8:04 Amazon to Acquire PlanetAll and Junglee for About $280 in Stock Seattle, Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. said it will buy closely held PlanetAll and Junglee Corp. for about $280 million in stock as the No. 1 online bookseller seeks to expand its Internet technology. Amazon said it will issue about 800,000 shares for PlanetAll and about 1.6 million shares for Junglee, and will assume all outstanding options obligations of the two companies. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based PlanetAll has 1.5 million members who use its Web-based address book, calendar and reminder service. Amazon said it will operate PlanetAll as a wholly owned subsidiary in Cambridge. Junglee, based in Sunnyvale, California, provides a Web- based database that helps shoppers find millions of products on the Internet. The founders of Junglee will remain with the company, Amazon said. Amazon shares fell 2 5/8 to 108 1/4 yesterday. --Aimee Picchi in the Princeton newsroom (609) 270-4021/rjb

To: H James Morris who wrote (12518)	8/4/1998 9:16:00 AM
From: Jan Crawley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

James, Are they the "sellers" ? (not today, but in the near future)

To: H James Morris who wrote (12518)	8/4/1998 10:28:00 AM
From: umbro	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Amazon.com will acquire 100 percent of the outstanding shares and assume all outstanding options of Junglee and PlanetAll in exchange for equity having an aggregate value of approximately $280 million. Amazon.com will issue approximately 800,000 shares and assume all outstanding options in connection with the acquisition of PlanetAll and anticipates accounting for this transaction as a pooling of interests. Amazon.com will issue approximately 1.6 million shares and assume all outstanding options in connection with the acquisition of Junglee and anticipates accounting for this transaction under the purchase method of accounting. Each transaction is expected to close within the quarter, subject to customary closing conditions. If I did the math right, they did a 280M acquisition with 2.4M (0.8 + 1.6) shares, and each share is valued at $117. Can't be bad news for AMZN shareholders, since they're getting their stock price validated. This only leaves the question of how much did AMZN receive in terms of sales, obligations, and _earnings_ in this acquisition? In other words, is the deal acretive?

To: H James Morris who wrote (12518)	8/4/1998 11:43:00 AM
From: umbro	Respond to of 164684

Expensive new customers Putting a few pieces together from the press release: PlanetAll has 1.5 million members, and thousands of new members are joining each day to use the secure, free service to organize and automatically update information about friends, business associates, relatives, and alumni. Amazon.com will issue approximately 800,000 shares and assume all outstanding options in connection with the acquisition of PlanetAll and anticipates accounting for this transaction as a pooling of interests. Let's say Planetall is at 2M "customers" (free-loaders? :)) by year end. that's 0.8M * $117, or $94M. At present prices, that's $47 per (non-paying) customer. Is that high/low? It depends on how much is received in book sales from this newly acquired channel. This boils down to how many members of planetall are not already AMZN customers, and how many then decide to buy books/CD's from AMZN. I'm sure from a cash point of view, this will be another one of those goodwill (lots of goodwill) acquisitions whose real cost will be overlooked by the analysts, however shareholders should consider whether this acquisition is a good use of their investment money. From the planetall.com web page, Background PlanetAll was launched in November, 1996 and now has over 1.4 million users. ÿWe have about 40 employees and are based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (expensive employees: $2mil per. They better be productive. :))

To: H James Morris who wrote (12518)	8/4/1998 3:56:00 PM
From: Stephen Oskoui	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Junglee is currently making most of its money by selling its technology to portal sites. Its customer list includes Yahoo, Go2Net, and Cnet's Snap. How does Amazon.com fit into this? First of all, will Amazon/Junglee continue to provide the technology to other sites or will they retain it for their own site? Also, will they continue to list other book and music sites in their database or will they limit it to Amazon.com? I see two possible reasons for this acquisition. The first is that they want to turn their site into more of a portal, which is also hinted to by the PlanetAll acquisition. In this case, they might be interested in listing their competitors in order to be the ultimate e-commerce destination site. They include their products as well as everyone else's product list (books.com has something like this). On the other hand, they might not care about comparison shopping at all. Perhaps they just acquired Junglee for their advanced virtual database technology. This might allow them to include a lot of additional content in the Amazon.com site. Unfortunately, I still have problems understanding why Amazon acquired Junglee instead of licensing the technology like the major portals did. Can anyone make better sense of this acquisition? Where do you think Amazon is going with it? Thanks, Steve