Ran across this interview. Thought I'd post it here.
wallstreetinterview.com
- Jeff
Planet City Software, Inc. (OTC BB: PINC) Greg Kraft, Vice President Marketing, Communications
WSI: Good morning. My guest today is Greg Kraft, who is Vice President Marketing, Communications for Planet City Software, Inc. First of all, good morning, Greg, and thanks for taking the time out of your busy day to speak to our investment audience about your company.
PINC: Thank you. It's nice to be here
WSI: Well, it's really a pleasure to have you on. Greg, if you could begin by giving us a biographical overview of the company's early days and founding, all the way up to where we are today. Also, tell us a little bit about your background, and how you came to be involved formally with the company?
PINC: The company was started in March of last year. We acquired the technology from Australia, which was a licensing solution for the PC market. There are over 300 million PCs worldwide today, and 97 percent of them are not Y2K compliant. Very few people are addressing the situation, and some are not even aware of it. I'm sure that most your listeners have not done anything to make their PCs Y2K compliant. If they do not, they will be running into problems starting January 1st, 2000. We needed a vehicle for the public company, and we did a reverse merger of an existing shell company on the Bulletin Board called Planet City. We liked the symbol PINC. Everyone else also liked the name, so we ended up keeping that, and added the word "Software", as well. We have a wholly-owned subsidiary in Montreal called Planet City Software Publications, and that is the operating and developing arm of the company. There are four people who are primarily involved in the company, all of various backgrounds. My background is in Finance. I was a stockbroker for many years, with a certain depth of knowledge in public relations. I was approached by one of my other partners, who I did not know at the time, and he was looking for financing. I'm very pleased to be associated with this company. Our other partners in Montreal are Rudy Rupak, who is the President of the subsidiary. He is our creative genius, and very technology oriented. He is a movie producer by inclination, who is now developing software for us. One of my other partners has a financial background, as well. Again, we started in March of last year, and we've been developing other products. Most people ask us, "There is only so much time left before the Millennium – then what are you going to do?" We have to start looking at other aspects, to make sure that we are going to be a growing company beyond 2000, and that's where we are today.
WSI: You bring up a great point here. Maybe we can flavor this point by asking what kind of synergies are achieved when coming up with solutions for Y2K,in taking that boilerplate and applying it to different kinds of solutions?
PINC: The big buzz right now is the Internet, and we are becoming an Internet company in many ways. On February 3rd, we announced that we now have a revolutionary software repair technology, which to the best of our knowledge, nobody else has. Our tool remediates the software for many programs, such as Excel spreadsheets. On January 26, we announced that we have the rights to web choice TV, which unites the television and the PC at no cost to the consumer. It is done through an audio signal, and for example, if you are watching a baseball game and Mark McGwire hits a home run, his stats will come up on your PC. If it is in the same room, and you are watching an advertisement or commercial, like Victoria's Secret, you will be linked to the Victoria's Secret web site. Where we benefit, is, we will be getting a fee from the advertiser for this. We see this as a very big market for ourselves, and we are also getting involved in original Internet content. We have developed a series called Future-tense, which is about someone lost in Cyberspace. We are currently negotiating with a very prominent company, and they are interested in purchasing our technology for Internet consumption. The most important thing that we've developed is our e-commerce kit, which we call "E-Com with ease". It offers anyone who wants to sell products on the Internet a very easy way of doing it. It costs us $15,000 to develop through our own trial and error, vis-à-vis getting a Merchant ID Number, getting credit card authorization and accounting packages. We're going to do all of that for an e-commerce company who wants to sell anything on the Internet for 1999. This is going to open up a whole new market. To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever developed anything like this. We are getting rave reviews, and people are inundating our phones whenever anyone hears about it. They ask, "When can I get it?". We expect to have the beta version available by April 15th of this year. That is going to be something that's very exciting. We are going to provide both front office and back office facilities for the person who wants to sell widgets on the Internet. It will make their life much simpler. They won't have to develop their own web page. We'll show them how to do it, we'll do their accounting, their credit card authorizations, etc. This is something that's needed, and as everyone knows, trillions of dollars are going to be spent on the Internet in e-commerce over the next few years.
WSI: From an investment perspective, what should investors be honing in on when looking at your company? For a company of your size, it must be unique to have infrastructure for solutions, software and content. You are currently covering many different bases, and that's got to be exciting.
PINC: It is very exciting, and we feel that once the investment world starts to take a closer look at us. Unfortunately, being on the Bulletin Board, we are discounted quite a bit. We, as everyone else on the Bulletin Board, anticipate that we will be trading on Nasdaq very soon. We don't qualify for it right now, but we're looking at acquisitions, and we are looking at acquiring technology that would enhance our bottom line and help us qualify for Nasdaq. We feel that we have an exciting company, and that we're just undiscovered now. We have been criticized, because many people say we've been taking away from our focus on Y2K. It's the theory of throwing something against the wall and making sure that some of it will stick, and that you will be successful. We're not stretching ourselves too thinly. We have cash in the bank, we have good management for other projects, and we're looking at expanding our work force. We are interviewing right now for both upper management and upper sales management positions. We are trying to build up our company. This is not the typical situation, whereby we are on the Bulletin Board, and the chances of this succeeding are less than 50 percent. We think we are going to be one of the ones that really succeed.
WSI: Along those lines, maybe you can support a point that you made earlier, that I think was very important. You stated your focus on growing prudently, while not spreading yourselves too thinly. Can you provide a couple of samples of what you mean by that?
PINC: Sure. The Y2K situation is fairly well in hand. We have an agreement with a group called PIE, which stands for Partners In Europe. We are selling our Y2K product in Europe now, and they will sell our other software products. The have over 60,000 value added resellers called VARs, under their auspices. They anticipate bringing in a lot of sales of the Y2K product. We have already established the sales here in North America on our Y2K products. So, that's well in hand. The Y2K product, as I said earlier, has not been well received from the point of view of having no sense of urgency for the individual PC user. We anticipate that our sales are going to go crazy through the end of the second quarter, but also in the third and fourth quarter of 1999. They will absolutely just go bananas. So, were not taking away from that. Our e-commerce kit is currently being developed. As I said, the beta version should be ready no later than April 15th. We have 5 programmers working on it right now. We are going to be making a series of announcements about our e-commerce kit over the next few weeks. Our first one should announced in the association with a very prominent company. I think that people are going to be very impressed with the alliances we have performed in the terms of who is going to be assisting us on this e-commerce kit. I think it will make people sit up and take notice that companies of that stature are dealing with a company like ours listed on the bulletin board. Again, the web choice that's already established, is just a function of selling the advertising and so that's not taking away from management. We've got everything well in hand and, as I said, were also looking at us acquiring other divisions and we'll find management to handle that aspect so it doesn't take away from the focus of what we're doing now.
WSI: The message to investors is that your really building on a foundation, and strengthening your business model potentially through some exciting business opportunities.
PINC: Exactly. There is so much out there that people are coming to us. Some of your listeners may say they have some software or they have an acquisition that they would like to entertain, and I would be glad to do so. We are being inundated with people looking to us for financial assistance. We're looking at everything because we want to grow into a major company and we think we're on the right track.
WSI: Greg, I know that talk about future acquisitions, but what about putting all the pieces of the puzzle together and really offering a turn key solution. What's unique here is that your'e multi-faceted, and you have expertise in the content area. You already told us about the strength of the management team. Are there any plans to put it all together from the standpoint of bringing the software, content and e-commerce components together? You are offering customers a package, where all they have to do is turn on the operation and everything else and you'll handle all of that together?
PINC: Absolutely! That's what the e-commerce kit is all about. It does everything for the individual. Someone who wants to sell ties on the Internet doesn't know how to develop a web page, and don't know how to go about getting their merchant ID number; They don't know how to go about getting credit card authorization. We are going to be able to provide them with credit card authorization. We provide the facilities within one hour, which would usually take them several days to several weeks if we weren't assisting them. We're going to make life so easy for people to sell on the Internet that they are going to be astounded. What we put into this package costs us $15,000 by trial and error to develop ourselves.
WSI: Are there any other e-commerce kits out there that your aware of that have so many solutions and really make it so easy to use?
PINC: NONE! There are none that we know of. That's not to say that somebody hasn't brought one out in the last little while, but I'm not aware of it. Again, alliances that were building will make people sit up and take notice. Were talking about fortune 100 companies, that are going to be contributing to our e-commerce kit, and I think that people are going to be very excited to be purchasing this product from us.
WSI: To sum up the decision once again, if you could just leave us with some quick bullet points with regard to strategic initiatives and what our investment group can look for in the company in the new year.
PINC: First of all, the symbol is PINC and it's listed on the Bulletin Board. We have about 15 million shares outstanding right now and we have cash in the bank. We are anticipating that we are going to have earnings, starting probably in the second quarter, due to the Y2K hysteria, but that has not transformed yet. So, were rethinking that. We have something exciting, and we are diversifying at a rapid rate, but not too rapidly that anyone out there should be concerned. We have competent management taking care of all these different divisions. We're on the acquisition trail, and were currently talking to a major firm that has millions of dollars in contracts. They want to divest themselves of their divisions, and were looking at that. We've already been told that we can raise the money to acquire them if we feel it's the right project. We're currently looking at acquiring other software technologies. We have the e-commerce kit, and its going to be huge. Y2k is going to be huge. If we just got one percent of the Y2k market over the next ten months, we would have $2 a share in earnings. It's not a stretch of the imagination that we can do a lot. We're talking to foreign governments and foreign individuals about acquiring our technology. Rudy Rupak is in China, and meeting with Government officials right now. We've just introduced a new Y2K product, before we had four disks, we now only have one disk. It's so simple, it's just two clicks and your PC is remediated. Anyone with limited technical expertise can follow the easy-to-use instructions. We have everything going for us. Our stock is currently trading just under one dollar, and we feel that were undervalued. We would be a terrific investment for people who want to put a little bit of speculative money to use. We would like to stress that this would be considered a speculative investment. We don't want to give people the impression that we're a blue chip company. We do feel that we're undervalued and that the market will soon realize that. We have an analyst in New York who has just approached us about doing a research report. We have three research reports out on us, and people can get that at www.planetcity.com. Just go into our news releases, our analyst reports and see anything that they want on the company. If investors want to phone us directly, please phone us at 1-800-219-8785, and somebody will be there to answer the phone 7 days a week.
|
