A walk in past: B2C in July 2000/Nasdaq

Attending a Goldman Sachs Technology Conference last week, I randomly picked up an old Research of the Bank, titled “Internet Global Trend” during a coffee break (several old researches were made available to the attendees).

The report was dated July 2000, few months after crash of the Nasdaq in March 2000.

On a page (please check attachment) were included the 36 listed B2C companies, including valuation, Market cap and the Price to Sales Multiples (Actuals and Forecasted).

It was a dive in the past, and I could not avoid checking out what happened to the 36 companies on the table. Did they survive?

Very few of them….Just 5 companies are still listed as independent companies, 10 went bust and 21 have been acquired by other players or are now part of others groups.

So, who survived? The usual suspects with 1 exception…

• Amazon

• Ebay

• Expedia

• Priceline

• 1-800flowers.com

Interesting fact: all the 5 survivors are currently trading at cheaper multiples than 17 years ago, meaning they were able to grow Revenues at a faster pace than their stock price.

Take Amazon. In July 2000 Amazon traded at 7.6x the Actual Revenues 2000 and 4.0x the Forecasted Revenues 2001.

As of today, Amazon trade at 3.1x the Actual Revenues 2016 and 2.8x the Forecasted Revenues of 2017.

Same story for the other 4 survivors.

Who made it, made it big. The Market capitalization of the 5 survivors grew from $26bn to $960bn in 2017.

Its very interesting is that that some sectors that never made it, are now hot investment topics:

Food on demand: Homegrocer.com and webvan.com (both went bust)

Vitamin business: Mothernature.com (bust), vitaminshoppe.com (acquired)

ps a share of Amazon was worth $36 in July 2000....