Glenn, through a friend I was able to get some Cpth before the stock hit the street. It was like pulling teeth.
Trust me on that.
Ps
You've heard the saying "The rich get rich while the poor get poorer".
It's sad that only the big guys get these offering. While us little guys have to beg, steal and borrow, to get a few thousand shares.
>>
San Francisco, March 29 (Bloomberg) -- Critical Path Inc., which handles e-mail for Internet service providers and other businesses such as E*Trade Group Inc. and Sprint Corp., almost tripled in its first day of trading.
The two-year old San Francisco-based company rose 41 7/8 to 65 7/8, giving it a market value of $2.25 billion. About 8.8 million shares changed hands on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The stock opened at 45 after the company sold 4.5 million shares, a 13 percent stake, at $24 each.
Critical Path operates e-mail systems for other companies, allowing them to reduce or eliminate spending on hardware, software, and systems engineers. Its customers also include ICQ, a subsidiary of America Online Inc.; Network Solutions Inc., which registers Internet domain names; and US West Inc. which provides local phone services.
Demand for Critical Path's services is likely to increase, said John Tamburro, an analyst with Jefferies & Co. in New York.
''There are a lot of smaller Internet service providers, and their only path is to outsource these types of services,'' he said. Also, ''there are a number of small, emerging (telecommunications companies) who want this type of service.''
About 300 billion electronic mail messages were sent in 1998, according to the company's filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Providing e-mail services ''is a very fast-growing segment as the technology becomes more complex and as it becomes more difficult for companies to do it themselves,'' said Jennifer McBrien, an analyst with Renaissance Capital Corp. in Greenwich, Conn.
500,000 Mailboxes
Critical Path added 500,000 electronic mailboxes in the first two months of this year, 50 percent more than were added in 1998, she said. The company's revenue comes mostly from contracts that pay based on the number of mailboxes.
Critical Path's customers are ''big names that investors know,'' and contributed to today's run-up in share price, McBrien said.
Prior to selling shares at 24, investor demand was strong enough that the company more than doubled the price from a range of $9 to $11. BancBoston Robertson Stephens handled the sale.
Critical Path lost $11.5 million on revenue of $897,000 last year, and had an accumulated deficit of $12.5 million at year's end.
Critical Path competes with e-mail service providers such as USA.NET Inc. and iName, and with companies that sell e-mail related software such as Lotus Development Corp.
There are ''only a handful of companies that do this currently,'' McBrien said.
The company's biggest shareholders include E*Trade, with 3.9 million shares or about 11.3 percent of the total; Doug Hickey, 43, the company's chief executive, with 1.3 million shares; and Wayne Correia, 32, the company's chief technology officer, with 2.5 million shares. Hickey and Correia' stakes were worth $86.7 million and $164.7 million respectively at today's close.
Executives
Hickey has served as CEO since October, before which he was executive vice president of Frontier Communications Corp., a telecommunications company, from February, 1998. Before that, he was chief executive of GlobalCenter Inc., a web hosting company.
David Hayden, 43, the company's founder and chairman of the board, holds 3.2 million shares, worth $212.1 million at today's close. He served as CEO from the company's inception through October. Before that, he served as CEO of The McKinley Group Inc., which created Magellan, an Internet search engine.
Proceeds from the stock sale may help the company grow by the opening of additional data centers and expanding overseas.
Critical Path trades under the symbol ''CPTH.'' Hambrecht & Quist LLC, Dain Rauscher Wessels and First Albany Corp. assisted Robertson in the sale.
) Mar/29/1999 17:20
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