To: H James Morris who wrote (22797 ) 10/24/1998 9:35:00 PM From: Glenn D. Rudolph Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 164685
Article 3 of 200 Business Amazon looks to book its place in the consciousness of Britishreaders Chris Ayres 10/20/98 The Times of London News International 4M Page 33 (Copyright 1998) Do not mention the words venture capital to Simon Murdoch, the 37- year-old managing director of Amazon .co.uk, the British division of the US Internet bookseller. Although obviously delighted to be playing a key role in one of the world's most famous Internet ventures - which yesterday began its first full week of trading in the UK - he took the job only after failing to secure large-scale financial backing for his own online book retailer, Bookpages.co.uk. If Amazon storms the book market within five years - as it looks likely to do with second-quarter sales in the US of $116 million (Pounds 69 million) - Dr Murdoch wants the City to know that it could easily have been a British, rather than American, success story. "In retrospect I should have got on a plane and flown to San Francisco," says Dr Murdoch, who studied physics at Cambridge, and went on to gain a PhD in artificial intelligence from London's Brunel University. "But I believed the story that British venture capitalists were interested in technology start-ups." Dr Murdoch found, to his dismay, that UK investors did not have any appetite for the kind of small, loss-making Internet companies that made many Wall Street brokers drool. In spite of incurring a net loss of $30.5 million during the six months to June, Amazon is valued at nearly $5 billion on the Nasdaq stock market. Before the recent global economic turmoil, it was worth nearly $8 billion. Amazon claims that in the UK there is already significant public demand for Internet services. This is likely to rise exponentially, Dr Murdoch argues, as more people get access to the Internet through media such as digital television. Over the past six months, Amazon claims that one million people in Britain have made an online purchase, with books making up 30 per cent of those sales. Dr Murdoch became involved with the Internet after joining a team of Buckinghamshire software developers in the 1980s that traded under the name of Triptych Systems. The company produced software mainly for Internet booksellers, and in 1996 Dr Murdoch founded a spin-off service, Bookpages.co.uk. He sent business plans to an enormous range of financial institutions, only to be rejected. In one case, he was told: "We already invest in an Internet venture." The contrast with Silicon Valley, where Internet entrepreneurs secure million-dollar deals over light lunches, was startling. Dr Murdoch instead managed to raise Pounds 1 million from a consortium of "business angels" in January 1998. Only two months later, Amazon paid $55 million for Bookpages, plus two other small European Internet companies. Amazon .co.uk now threatens to cause havoc in the British bookselling market, and will compete head-on with the Internet Bookshop, which was bought by the retailer WH Smith (after the Amazon deal) for Pounds 9.5 million. Dr Murdoch is already predicting a war over book prices, with Amazon selling many bestselling titles at a 40 per cent discount to its traditional competitors. The service is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and most books are delivered within two to three days. Initially, Amazon will offer more than 1.4 million titles, with many of them being stored in the company's warehouse on the outskirts of London. The launch of Amazon 's service is likely to be viewed as a profound threat by small booksellers. They complained three years ago that competition in the industry would kill them off when the Net Book Agreement was abandoned. Dr Murdoch already seems prepared for controversy, but is convinced that both Internet booksellers and their independent rivals can coexist. This does not prevent him from launching into his sales pitch, however. " Amazon really is a whole new concept in shopping convenience for anyone and everyone," he boasts. "Customers can find and order any books they want quickly and easily." Caption: Simon Murdoch predicts a book price war with Amazon selling titles at a 40 per cent discount