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Gold/Mining/Energy : BCE Emergis - global e-commerce -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: salva who wrote (734)	5/16/1999 11:34:00 PM
From: rocki	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1341

BCE MEGA SITE Saw this in the Montreal Gaz-15may99 BCE MEGA SITE IS GOOD NEWS FOR INVESTORS Plan to develop high grade Net portal likely includes major upgrade of online financial research tools There are good things in store for Canadian investors if reports that BCE Inc. intends to bankroll a Canadian mega-site on the Internet turn out to be accurate. An energetic backer with deep pockets is just what's needed to bring higher standards of Performance to Canadian investor information sites, and to encourage other players to compete more vigorously. BCE owns a minority 40~per-cent interest in Canoe, one of the two most popular existing Canadian content sites. Quebecor, with its recent purchase of Sun Media, owns 60 per cent. BCE also owns a majority 75 percent interest in Sympatico, which is head to head with Canoe in terms of popularity. The plan appears to be to put the two together and pump money in to make the merged site the top Canadian content Web portal. That's the term for sites that strive to be the first place surfers go when they log on to the Web. Typically they provide free E-mail, information and opportunities to buy products and services online. For BCE, such a move could be a big step toward rationalizing its various Internet interests. The company sees fast growing Internet traffic as a source of future growth to help offset lower growth and profits in its traditional telephone business. The glamour of the Internet could help boost its stock, and eventually it could spin off a successful portal site to investors for lots of money as has been done several times in the United States. There is much more to the Canoe and Sympatico sites than information for investors, of course. Both strive to provide a wide range of Canadian content to attract visitors and bring them back frequently. They can then sell advertising to companies interested in reaching their audience. But information for investors has become a staple ingredient of portal sites. Stock quotes and basic market-information packages are found every where, mainly because they're easy to provide. That poses a problem also: how do you make your content sufficiently attractive and different from the competition so that surfers click away happily on your site rather than somebody else's? Canoe and Sympatico have made a start. They provide Canadian investment information on a scale that most U.S. sites don't. But they have a long way to go to match for Canadian investors what the leading U.S. sites provide for U.S. investors. Both sites give a visitor the feeling they're not yet attuned to the speed and topicality today's Web demands. OUTDATED INFORMATION For instance, in early afternoon the other day the latest Canadian stock market wrap-up from their news source, Reuters, was hours old. Canoe's Money Centre does have good market statistics in its Market Highlights, updated through the day Sympatico gets its quotes and market statistics from an excellent Canadian source iMoney. For more detailed reviews of the investment information packages at Canoe and Sympatico, and links to the sites, go to my Web site (see below). But that kind of stuff is easy and fairly inexpensive. Providing quality commentary and current fundamental investment research is hard and expensive. Canoe does provide excellent commentary and research on U.S. stocks through an arrangement with TheStreet.com, a leading US. site in this field. What it takes to provide quality content was reflected in finan-cial figures for TheStreet published in connection with its phenomenally successful new issue of shares this week. The site took in just $4.6 million in the latest 12 months, but lost $16 million as it spent heavily to build market share. Nobody in Canada yet provides the quality of investment research and commentary that TheStreet provides. It takes a willingness to spend a lot of money on two things. First, it's necessary to hire, and provide a good work-ing environment for, professional financial journalists who can create and write quality content. Second, it takes a willingness to spend a lot of money on marketing. MIGHT BE WILLING TO SELL Where Quebecor stands in all this is not clear. It already has a big task on its plate to absorb and rationalize the expansion of its newspaper empire with its acquisition of the Sun newspapers, so perhaps it will be willing to sell its Canoe holding at a good price. Then if BCE really commits itself to spending on the scale the project demands, and to the management attention required, an arranged marriage of Canoe with Sympatico could payoff big for everybody involved. And Canadian investors would have a Canadian content site worthy of a top rating. + Hugh Anderson's Web site is at: www.unclehughje.com