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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Tokyo Joe's Cafe / Societe Anonyme/No Pennies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gerald L. Kerr who wrote (6979)	10/23/1998 7:45:00 AM
From: TokyoMex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 119973

You mean this one ? ;-) Top Stories: Volpe Notebook: CMGI, Advanced Fibre, Value America and Theglobe.com By TSC Staff Writers 10/22/98 7:37 PM ET CMG Information Services (CMGI:Nasdaq) is already considered a top-tier Internet stock, but unlike America Online (AOL:NYSE) or Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq), it hasn't managed its earnings. In its most recent quarter ended July 31, CMG posted a profit of $1.27 per share, but it's zigzagged in and out of red ink for the past few years. For seven out of the last 12 quarters, CMG has shown losses. "Earnings predictability is not our strong suit," said Bill White, president of CMG's Internet group in an interview with TheStreet.com at the Volpe Brown Whelan Internet & Communications conference Thursday. But he points out that CMG is partly a direct marketing company and partly a venture capital firm. CMG's three-step investment process works like this: Get into compelling Internet technology early, publicize the heck out of it, then help sell it to the highest bidder or take it public. All in all, investors have liked the model. While CMG's stock is down 55% since August, it's still up more than 3,500% from its January 1994 IPO. "We aren't relying on traditional earnings-per-share goals but rather on having investors look at our stock as a way to invest on the Web," White said. Just last week, when Amazon.com (AMZN:Nasdaq) bought PlanetAll, CMGI received 800,000 Amazon shares for its 25% stake in the startup. Those shares were worth $22.4 million as of last week, a 400% return on the $4.5 million CMGI initially invested in PlanetAll. And CMGI's 29% stake in GeoCities is worth about $215 million -- a 3,000% return on its initial investment, despite GeoCities' recent tumbles. (Flatiron Partners, a minority shareholder in TheStreet.com, is also an investor in GeoCities.) What's CMG's next trick? The buzz at the Volpe conference concerned Silknet, a Web-based customer service software that CMG holds a 24% stake in. White hopes Silknet will replace client/server applications. One West Coast money manager, who owns CMG shares and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, suggested that Silknet's IPO could be bigger than Geocities'. Already, Microsoft (MSFT:NYSE), which also owns a small stake in CMGI, is using Silknet's eService software.