Internet Business Share Discussion Threads

[the blackster] 27/6/2007 15:50

TomJ - no.1 they are not travel heavy, they have merchants across the board, no.2 travel is massive online. It will only grow more if consumers tighten their belts and spend more on online travel rather than expensive high street holidays. Check out the merchant list before thinking these guys are one dimensional.

[aleman] 27/6/2007 15:46

I don't do blue sky either normally. It just seemed a product that works really well and addresses a market (online tv distribution) for which there wasn't a decent product yet. Incorporating advertising into video is a big bonus. It will clearly do well but the question is what share price that justifies. Fantastic deals signed but it remains to be seen how they are monetised. Rupert Murdoch clearly thought there is something in it.

Their etail hijacker sounds interesting. Anybody ever heard of technology that can substitute a cheaper deal for an etail transaction at the point of execution - effectively an automated purchase search rather than looking through various retail sites yourself? It sounds like the sort of thing IBG would try.

[yump] 27/6/2007 14:32

Aleman
If you're around...much against my better judgement I stuck a bit from here into Blinkx. Don't normally go for blue sky stocks, but at least their technology is very widespread. What happens next, no idea !

[tomj] 27/6/2007 14:29

they are too travel heavy in terms of their merchant focus and owned and operated websites.....if consumers stop spending on travel this year with interest rate rises biting then IBG will be a 5p share by easter 08....

[68steve] 27/6/2007 11:39

For a 2 year hold they represent value but you could say that for 100`s of stocks.But given markets/housing/credit all looking at a peak the building society may give better returns but then that would`nt be as interesting/exciting/nerve racking would it,Good luck anyway...

[the analyst] 26/6/2007 23:54

I bought a lot of shares over the last two days. I see good value from these levels over the next few years. There is still uncertainty over how serious this profit warning really is, though, but I'm hoping that a lot of it is down to Maz's ultra-conservative outlook. Time will tell I guess.

[yump] 26/6/2007 22:57

The shares have been looking cheap plus the possibility of a bid for a year or so.

Why would a predator pay now for a business over which there are some doubts, when they could have still bought it cheaply 6 months ago when there were no doubts ?

Serious acquisitive companies won't wait for a good acquisition to get cheaper, they'll just buy it when its cheap, whenever it suits their strategy. Plenty overpay to get the timing right.

They're not pound-shoppers.

Polzeath:
The valuation wasn't rich previously. Acquisitive companies do look more than a year ahead to get a valuation.

[hirschnathan] 26/6/2007 22:43

Anyone have the latest resarch note, they seem to have gone from the ibg website

Thanks

[liarspoker] 26/6/2007 22:28

I can tell you for a fact that it was Maz that posted. He confirmed it to me in an Email ( asking him if it was really himself that posted ).

[polzeath] 26/6/2007 22:03

SAGEM - that was before IBG realised nobody thought them worth buying at the (then) current market valuation. Ie the valuation was demonstrably rich.

[shroder] 26/6/2007 21:26

Lord Buffett - Fair enough, no one reponded to my orginal post regarding confirmation of the Maz post

[sagem] 26/6/2007 21:11

MONEY WEEK MAGAZINE excellent write up on this company the shares look to cheap plus the possibility of a bid

[stemis] 26/6/2007 19:40

Have you tried therapy?

[12345th] 26/6/2007 19:24

dgm redux. unbefugginlievable. Another mega-bullish ceo, everything in the garden super-rosy. And then, out of a clear blue sky, WHAMBAMTHANKYOUMAAMYOU´VE LOST MOST OF YOUR MONEY HAHAHAHA. And since you´re all outsiders, you´ll never really know what´s going on in "your" company, you´ll just have to guess and fret and guess again and fret again and hope and despair and waste LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of time while the share price fails to recover from its horrifying fall, even though it was supposed to be sooooooooo undervalued at twice the price. What a bunch of amateurs and what bunch of masochistic muggs we outsiders are.

[lord buffett] 26/6/2007 18:59

Shroder - Yes it is a fact.

'Maz'[iar Darvish], the CEO of IBG, very occasionally posts, but only to clarify/correct certain points.

(You can easily confirm this by ringing him if you so wish.)

[shroder] 26/6/2007 17:53

Is this a fact?

or are we using an anonymous bb?

Omlaysause - 25 Jun'07 - 10:29 - 2404 of 2454

Well, the fact remains that a CEO came onto a BB board to help clarify a situation and put certain things into perspective for each and every one of us.

[hirschnathan] 26/6/2007 17:44

What I understand, the primary message of the rns was telling us that there will be more money spent on staff costs, but to hold up the eps there will have to be a buyback

[the analyst] 26/6/2007 17:04

hirsch, yes, some of the profit is being used to invest in the tech, but are you saying you think that they have now given up on the thought of share buy-backs as a method of returning value from some of the remaining profit and cash already in the bank? I think even after the extra planned costs of new staff there will still be plenty of scope for a dividend. I also think if they want to get rid of cash to give investor value rather than invest it, then dividends are better than buy-backs because they encourage long-term investors to invest and hold.

Personally, I prefer re-investment to buy-backs or dividends. Especially if its in the form of profitable acquisitions that come with talented staff.

[stemis] 26/6/2007 16:56

Sell the E-commerce business

Almost certainly that is what they would like to do.

[hirschnathan] 26/6/2007 16:53

Ta

The company is using the cash to recruit new techies, to roll out the products quicker

[68steve] 26/6/2007 16:52

Sell the E-commerce business and use the cash for share buy-back,kill 2 birds with 1 stone...

[the analyst] 26/6/2007 16:50

With rising interest rates and some pretty good high interest savings rates around now, the cash in the bank could be earning quite a bit on it's own. Dividends may well provide better value for investors than a share buy-back.

If IBG don't need extra money to fund expansion, then they could probably easily pay 6% per year for the forseeable future. That would also highlight the company to a new group of potential value investors that see dividends as an important source of income.

[pay2click] 26/6/2007 16:35

I am very suprised by the new share price .. it seems like a very dramatic over-reaction to a negative RNS.

It is slightly gutting because I asked around a few months ago (when the share price wasn't going up like it was supposed to). And I was given a lot of reasurances about the future for IBG.

This scenario was not predicted then... I feel like we are 2 years away from getting back to 30p. Hey ho... maybe by then they will decide to dish out some dividends.

[lord buffett] 26/6/2007 16:20

In the old days (over a year ago) they did [coincidentally] seem to correlate quite well with revenues for a while.

However that has not been the case for well over a year now, as evidenced by the last results where revenue and profit growth were way outstripping the Alexa metrics.

I actually mentioned the Alexa stats as part of a question at a previous AGM (not the last one) and was told, despite the coincidence, that they had no relevance to IBG's sales activity/performance as they simply didn't measure/reflect it.

(The same applies to rank as well as reach of course.)

Edit: In response to the previous post above, which was posted during the typing of this one, the analogy is more like measuring the activity in the TV studio rather than anything to do with the audience, i.e. the two are pretty much unrelated.