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Technology Stocks : Egghead Computer (EGGS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Avariceman who wrote (5945)	1/19/1999 3:14:00 AM
From: Rick McDougall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8307

Don't know if this is what you are looking for: Posted at 9:37 p.m. PST Monday, January 18, 1999 @Home-Excite announcement expected Jan. 18: Chris Nolan's column on the proposed merger Mercury News Staff and Wire Reports High-speed Internet access company @Home Corp. today is expected to announce plans to buy Redwood City neighbor Excite Inc., a top Internet destination, for about $6 billion in stock, according to published reports. Such a high-profile deal would give @Home, which delivers the Internet to subscribers over cable television lines, tools for personalizing, searching and simplifying the Web that it needs as it battles rivals including industry giant America Online for users and revenue sources. It would also provide Excite with the deep pockets needed to compete as a destination site for viewers on a field increasingly dominated by large corporations. Sunnyvale-based Infoseek Corp., for example, has joined forces with Walt Disney Co. AOL has agreed to buy Mountain View-based Netscape Communications Corp. And Yahoo Inc. of Santa Clara is backed by Softbank. With AT&T's pending purchase of cable giant Tele-Communications Inc., AT&T would become @Home's largest shareholder. And where AT&T Worldnet offers Excite the ability to reach dial-up customers over a standard service, @Home offers the chance to go for sophisticated, generally upper income households. If completed, the deal would be one of the biggest in a flurry of recent Internet acquisitions, exceeding even the $4.2 billion purchase of Netscape by AOL, announced two months ago. The boards of both companies met on Monday. Barring last-minute snags, an announcement is planned in New York before the opening of the stock market, the New York Times said Monday night. Any deal would have to be approved by the shareholders of both companies. Both companies declined to discuss reports of the negotiations. @Home has exclusive contracts with its cable TV partners, meaning that every cable-modem user on those networks has to subscribe to and pay for @Home's service. So the company doesn't have to battle for customers on Tele-Communications Inc.'s network, for example, or Cox Communication' systems. Federal and local regulators are under growing pressure, however, to let cable-modem users choose other Internet service providers instead of @Home. America Online is pushing the regulators particularly hard, urging them to use AT&T's proposed purchase of TCI as an excuse to end @Home's preferred status. Meanwhile, AOL is striking or negotiating deals with phone and cable companies to offer its own high-speed Internet access service. With its proposed purchase of Netscape, AOL is positioning itself to offer an attractive combination of tools to search, personalize and simplify the Internet for users. @Home officials see themselves providing not just an online service for computers, but also an information service for any device that can be connected to the Internet at high speeds -- a television, for example. The key would be having a simple, consistent interface for the service, which is another arena where Excite's technology might prove useful. Excite's shareholders would own about 30 percent of the combined company, to be named @Home, according to the New York Times. Specifics of the deal for shareholders could not be learned Monday night. George Bell, Excite's chief executive, would take an executive position in the merged company and join its board. The value of @Home's stock outstanding is about $10.4 billion, while Excite's shares are worth a total of about $3.5 billion. Excite's stock closed at $67.50 on Friday, up $2.38, while @Home closed at $102, down 63 cents. Stock markets in the United States were closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Despite the size of the deal, neither company has turned a profit, though revenue and customer use are growing for both. Excite lost $6.9 million on revenue of $44 million for the latest quarter, while @Home lost $9.7 million on revenue of $13.8 million. @Home now has more 330,000 customers for its service. The deal would give it access both to Excite's more than 20 million registered users and to the company's content-development capabilities. The two companies have much in common. The Redwood City offices of Bell and Thomas Jermoluk, @Home's chairman, president and chief executive, are separated by a parking lot. Further, both companies were financed in their beginnings by venture partners at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and have board members from the same company. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mercury News Staff Writers Jon Healey and Chris Nolan contributed to this report.