Verdant Share Discussion Threads

[mattharrop] 30/11/2000 15:20

Virtual Internet capitalisation is now approx. equal to the amount of cash they have due to the institutional placing around £9.
Looking very cheap now IMHO - having said that i don't hold any yet as i am waiting for the bottom. Shirley no lower than £1?

[planetearth] 08/11/2000 20:39

More interestingly, why did it shoot up today?

T.

[dennisbergkamp] 07/11/2000 00:42

What is the story here? Keeps plunging to new lows.

D.

[shadowman] 03/9/2000 21:29

Shadowman
Just starting to come off the floor with huge volume on Friday 1st
Sept..

Still 5 times below its year high.

Starting a big bull run following Sage deal announced last week?










RNS Number:1727Q
Virtual Internet PLC
31 August 2000


Contact Jason Drummond, Chief Executive Officer
Virtual Internet plc 020 7460
4060

David Bick
Holborn Public Relations 020 7929
5599

[e-mail]


Virtual Internetplc

Virtual Internet secures strategic partnership with Sage

Virtual Internet plc ('Virtual Internet'), the European Internet
services company, announces a partnership with software company
Sage Group plc ('Sage'). Under the terms of the agreement, Virtual
Internet will provide access to a host of domain name services,
including registration, email and web forwarding solutions to all
Sage's UK customers.

The partnership will allow UK visitors to the Sage site
(www.uk.sage.com) to search all generic top level domain names
as well as .co.uk and .org.uk suffixes, beforeregistering the name
of their choice via an easy-to-use interface with Virtual Internet.

Commenting on the announcement, Mike Gordon, UK Commercial Director
at Virtual Internet, said:

'Virtual Internet is committed to providing quality, innovative
Internet services. We are delighted to be bringing these services
to Sage's 2.2 million customers worldwide. Strategic partnerships
with key industry players such as Sage further consolidates Virtual
Internet's position as a leading European Internet services company.'


Paul Stobart, Sage Group's Chief Operating Officer, added:

'This partnership helps to reinforce Sage's position as a major player
in the e-business field by adding further value to our existing
range of Internet-based products and services.'

Initially the service will be made available to all Sage UK customers
and plans are already being made to extend this service to continental
Europe within the next few months. Virtual Internet is an
ICANN-accredited domain name registrar and, through its network of
International offices, is able to register domains in over 220
countries worldwide.

This deal is a further step in fulfilling a strategic objective
to develop wholesale partnerships. Virtual Internet already has
partnerships with AOL and Compuserve in France and MSN in the UK.

Sage is the world's largest supplier of accounting and payroll
software to the SME community with a turnover of #307 million in 1999
and over 2.2 million customers worldwide. In the UK, Sage recorded an
annual turnover of #99.2 million last year, with operating profits of
#39.6 million. Sage is committed to helping its 2.2 million customers
take full advantage of the Internet by offering them a wide range
of e-commerce products and services.

NOTES TO EDITORS

Virtual Internet plc

Virtual Internet plc (LSE: VET) is an Internet services company
offering solutions to enable businesses to register and protect their
names, and to make their websites work quickly and reliably.

Virtual Internet established its London HQ in 1996 and has grown
rapidly with further offices in Paris and Beauvais, New York, Milan,
and Sydney.

Virtual Internet provides:

Retail domain-based services, such as domain name registration, web
sitehosting, e-mail services, e-commerce solutions, application
server hosting and server co-location.

Wholesale domain-based services, the provision of certain registry
and domain services, hosting application services and e-commerce
services as well as solutions to a customer who then retails the
service to its own,typically large, client base.

Virtual Internet currently host over 70,000 domains and provides one
of the fastest web hosting services in the UK (according to
independent performance testing published in Internet magazine).
Further, over half of the FTSE Top 100 index has used Virtual
Internet's services in the past year.

On 18th April 2000, Virtual Internet completed its most
recent fundraising and moved from AIM to the Official List of the
London Stock Exchange (VET).


END

[clem] 24/5/2000 17:23

Seems to be falling in line with the rest of the sector.

[goodfella] 22/5/2000 13:15

And More bad News for VETAnd more bad news for VET from today's Times


Cable company, NTL hopes to break into the e-commerce arena by offering to develop a web shopfront free of charge. Businesses will then be charged a monthly rent of between £20 and £99 depending on the size of the business.

[goodfella] 22/5/2000 08:41

I was intrigued by a poster on e trade who questioned the rapid decline of Virtual internet share price and having looked into it the fall seems perfectly justified and even at these levels could still be more than 100% overvalued.

VET is in the business of registering Domain names and creating and managing web sites for clients, and with the recent collapse of Boo.com, the realisation is hitting home that Business to consumer web sites for everything are not going to work and therefore I would forsee a decline in the rate of web site creation and domain registration.

As a loss making company I cannot see how VET can maintain a compound growth rate and this would be reflected in the next accounts.

In this present bear market as I am actively looking for stocks to short this seems a prime candidate.

They still have a market cap of £124 million which is roughly 60times
1999 sales.

After 4 million losses last year it will be some time in the future
before they are profitable and with potentially net cash of only 65pence per share they could quite easily reach a level of £1 or less

Looking into this further it appears all but £15 million of
the cash which was set aside for acquisitions was already spoken for.
and also more worrying in the recent report it was stated that apart from the CEO none of the other shareholders were subject to any lock in arrangements and could dump their stock at any time.

I can empathise with your reaction that the fall from £9.90 to today's
levels seems overdone but this is clearly an example of another stock
which got ahead of itself in the tech frenzy and at £9.90 had a market
cap of approaching 450 million.

The highlights of the fundraising were



The Directors intend to use the proceeds of the Placing in developing the Group's existing business and for acquisitions. Within the existing business, the Directors intend to spend approximately: #3.0 million on the Group's infrastructure, including new web site hosting equipment; #1.5 million to fund the costs of additional administration, sales and technical staff; #3.5 million on advertising and marketing costs, principally within wholesale domain-based services and directed mainly at the corporate market; and #2.0 million on general corporate expenditure, including supporting the establishment of the Group's existing overseas operations.

The more I look at this the worse it gets .

I note that the 1999 accounts show sales of 2.07 million and losses of 4.43 million which would produce a cost of sales and overhead of 6.5 million.

From the companies statement above it appears that the 2000 accounts will show a further cost of sales and overhead in order to fund expansion of 10 million and at a rough guess I would project the total for 2000 as circa 14 million.

Should we be generous and assume that they are able to double sales in 2000 to 4.14 million this would
still leave us with a loss for 2000 of just under 10 million.

The fact that the certain shareholders including the CEO placed almost 700,000 shares at 9.00 on his own account in the recent fundraising also gives cause for concern.



Since it started its decline the chart shows little or no support at all and with average daily volume pathetically low and on some days actually zero it appears every sell will force the price down further.



As it appears it may be some years before they are into profit I cannot envisage many buyers for this stock and as any news releases by any company seem to have negligible upward movement on any stocks in the present market I really cannot see what will produce any sustained buying.

Buyers in today’s market are looking for growth or value or daytraders looking for volatility and IMHO at present VET does not fall into any of these categories.

No investment advice offered or intended.