Priceline PCLN Februar: rebound-Kandidat - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[guuruh]

Der gestrige Kursanstieg laesst die Hoffnungen wieder aufgehen.
Der Einstieg der Chinesen, ein Break-even im Q2/Q3 2001,
ein gut laufendes Geschaeft mit Tickets und Expansionsfantasien
machen PCLN zu einem potentiellen rebound-Kandidat.

Sogar ANALysten lehnen sich vorsichtig aus ihren Loechern aus,
was die gestrige Empfehlung belegt.

@ einige aus dem Parallelthread
Die beste Prerformance seit September erzielte meine Oma,
die ihr Geld in ihrem Waescheschrank hat. Aber wer haette das
damals fuer moeglich gehalten?

cheers, guuruh

===
Coverage initiated on priceline.com by Legg Mason
Legg Mason at Strong Buy

===
Priceline shares leap after `buy` rating

By Jennifer Waters, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 2:43 PM ET Feb 23, 2001

CHICAGO (CBS.MW) -- Shares of Priceline.com Inc. took flight
Friday - up 40 percent - after an analyst urged investors to
aggressively purchase the stocks.

In recent trading, Priceline (PCLN: news,
msgs) shares were changing hands at $2.72, up
69 cents in above-average volume.

The surge came with thanks to Legg Mason
Wood Walker Inc. analyst Thomas
Underwood, who initiated coverage of the
company with a "strong buy" recommendation and a price target of
$6.

In a report to clients, Underwood said the worst is behind Priceline,
whose stock has plunged from a high of $104.25 to a low of $1.06.

He should know. He worked full time at the company until June,
developing its hotel operations. "I understand the model pretty
well," he said, "and its seasonality and profit model.

"I didn`t pick up coverage of it until now because there always were
issues concerning affiliated companies and other possible charges,"
he said. "They`re all gone now."

Underwood agreed with senior executives, who said on a
conference call last week that the company is expected to turn a
profit by June.

"The business is there and they`re focused on the profitable portions
of the business," he said in an interview. He expects Priceline to
generate $5 million this year in earnings before interest, taxes,
depreciation and amoritization and then jump to more than $50
million next year. This year, he projects sales to reach about $1.1
billion, about 5 percent above last year`s.

On a per-share basis this year, Underwood projects Priceline to lose
4 cents in the first quarter, and then earn 2 cents in the second
quarter, 3 cents in the third and 4 cents in the fourth.

"I don`t expect much growth this year," he said. "Not because the
business is flatlining, but because it took such a hit in the second
half of last year, and it was so strong in the first half that the
comparisons make it look flat."

Indeed, Priceline shocked investors when it reported fourth-quarter
losses of 15 cents a share, more than double the losses expected.

Underwood said the ongoing cost structure - trimmed considerably
in the fourth quarter - allows Priceline to continue to generate
more gross profits than its closest competitors, Expedia.com and
Travelocity.com

"Despite the company`s checkered past regarding hitting earnings
estimates and expansion plans, we are confident in" the near-term
outlook.

There was a caveat, of course.

"We believe Priceline to be the most speculative investment among
the Internet stocks we cover, and we only recommend purchase by
investors with extremely high risk tolerance," Underwood said in
the note.

Underwood said he still holds about 2,500 options at $3.20 a share.
Even if the stock were to double in price because of his
recommendation, "my total benefit is less than $2,000," he said. "I
better not be depending on that as a paycheck."

The day he left the concern in March, shares were trading at $95
each. He stayed part-time with Priceline through December to keep
his options vested, which, he was quick to add, "turned out to be
totally worthless."


Jennifer Waters is a reporter for CBS.MarketWatch.com.


http://www2.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?nu=1&source=…

[guuruh]

February 23, 2001

When Priceline Hit the Skids, Its Founder,
Jay Walker, Stopped Work on His Mansion

By Julia Angwin
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

RIDGEFIELD, Conn. -- Priceline.com is the house that
Jay Walker built. But Mr. Walker`s own house in the
woods here is only part-built.

At 24,000 square feet, Priceline.com founder Jay Walker`s
$7.5 million mansion was going to rival the biggest houses
in this wealthy community about an hour and a half from
Manhattan. But when Priceline`s fortunes plunged, so did
Mr. Walker`s. And nothing symbolizes his loss quite as
well as the foundation that sits on a twisty lane here.

According to architectural plans filed at the Ridgefield
Building Department, the mansion was to have eight
bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, three garages, two swimming
pools, a wine cellar, a spiral staircase and a grand
three-story library with floors of red oak and
13-foot-high windows trimmed in mahogany. Also a
1,600-square-foot poolhouse, a 2,000-square-foot squash
court, an exercise room, a sauna and an indoor spa with
stars on the ceiling, and a cupola on the roof.

After excavating to build on the nine-acre site and after
pouring the foundation last year, Mr. Walker, 45 years
old, abruptly stopped work on the project in November, as
Priceline shares fell to about $5 from an April 1999 high
of $162. They closed Thursday at $2.03, amid continuing
doubts about the company`s name-your-own-price
system to sell airline tickets on the Web. Mr. Walker, his
architect and his general contractor all declined to be
interviewed for this article.

In a statement made through a spokesman, Kevin
Goldman, Mr. Walker said, "I`m proud of my business
accomplishments and accept responsibility for my
entrepreneurial failures. It`s pathetic that The Wall Street
Journal is interested in the size of my house." Mr.
Goldman added that construction will resume this year.

Kicking Up Dust

The construction has caused a stir in Ridgefield. "Talk
about pretentious," says planning and zoning commission
member John Katz as he unrolls the drawing of the
mansion made by Mark P. Finlay Architects. Mr. Katz
voted to approve a wetlands permit for the site -- giving
Mr. Walker the right to build -- but the commission had
no say-so about the size of the house. "Nobody, regardless
of the size of his ego, needs a house of quite these
proportions," he says.

Last summer part of the road that passes the house
collapsed under the weight of hundreds of dump-truck
loads of dirt and rock that were being taken from the site
by the general contractor, Hobbs Inc. For several months,
the road had to be made one-way, and though it has been
patched temporarily, some residents complain that it`s
unsafe. Mr. Walker has agreed to pay for part of the road
repair, which Ridgefield Highway Superintendent Peter
Hill says could cost $80,000.

In a letter to the editor of the Ridgefield Press in August,
resident Anne S. Bator, alluding to the nearby New York
suburb, called the house evidence of "the
`Westchesterization` of Ridgefield, a small town
overwhelmed by trophy homes." Others wrote in to
complain about Mr. Walker`s driveway, which is carved
into the hillside and dominated by a large concrete
retaining wall. "It looks to me like an interstate-highway
exit ramp," wrote Ridgefield resident Rob Kinnaird.

A neighbor on the same street, Laura Fried, says the place
looks like a correctional facility, with its chain-link fence
and unfinished driveway. "It`s bad enough that they ruined
the beauty of that mountain," she says. "Now, at least they
should build a house and get it over with."

Through his spokesman, Mr. Walker said the delay doesn`t
have anything to do with his financial decline.

Mr. Walker, who grew up in a middle-class home in
Yonkers, N.Y., is known for working 12-hour days, and
for talking tirelessly about his marketing ideas. During the
past two decades he has started nearly a dozen businesses.
Some failed, some were sold and some did reasonably
well. But none caught on as Priceline did.

`Total Believer`

Mr. Walker didn`t cash out most of his Priceline stake for
the first year and a half after the company went public at
$16 a share in March 1999. In November 1999, Mr.
Walker paid Delta Airlines Inc. $125 million, or $59.93 a
share, for Priceline stock it owned.

"He`s a total believer," says his longtime friend Michael
Loeb, who with Mr. Walker founded Synapse Group Inc.,
which markets magazine subscriptions.

At his peak, Mr. Walker was worth, on paper, about $10
billion. In August 1999, he bought a blue Mercedes-Benz
S600 sedan, the third Mercedes he owned. For the
millennium New Year`s Eve that year, he and Mr. Loeb
rented Windows on the World, at the top of one of the
World Trade Center towers, for a black-tie affair
sponsored by Synapse.

Mr. Walker and his wife, Eileen, who live in a big
colonial house in Ridgefield, had purchased nine acres of
land across town for $525,000 in 1995. In February 2000,
they submitted the plans to build an English country style
mansion on it.

While construction was in full swing, Mr. Walker was
also trying to expand Priceline`s business model into
products beyond airline tickets. He started Priceline
WebHouse Club Inc. to sell groceries and gasoline and
began selling his shares to fund the new venture.

In August 2000, he sold $190 million in Priceline stock at
$23.75 a share, and said he put the after-tax proceeds of
the sale into WebHouse Club. But even that cash infusion
couldn`t save WebHouse Club from its losses, and it went
out of business in October after burning through $363
million in less than a year. Mr. Goldman says colleagues
at WebHouse and Priceline put together a $12 million
fund to help Mr. Walker meet the obligations of shutting
down WebHouse.

Short of Promise

Though it weathered the dot-com market storm last
spring, Priceline shares plummeted in the fall on news that
the company won`t meet its promise to turn a profit by
year end and that WebHouse was shutting its doors.

The setback prompted Mr. Walker to start unwinding his
Priceline stake. In November, Mr. Walker sold, for just $8
million, the additional shares he bought from Delta. And
last week, Mr. Walker announced plans to sell $24 million
in stock, at $2.12 a share, to two Hong Kong
conglomerates: Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. and Cheung
Kong Ltd. Mr. Walker declined comment on what he
plans to do with the proceeds.

In December, Mr. Walker stepped down from
Priceline.com`s board, severing his ties to the company he
founded. He is now running closely held Walker Digital
Corp., which owns about 70 business-method patents and
which patented Priceline`s name-your-own-price system.

Meanwhile, Connecticut is suing Walker Digital for not
giving enough notice to the 100 employees (80% of its
work force) it laid off in November. The company says
the lawsuit is without merit. In addition, more than a
dozen of Walker Digital`s former managers are still
waiting for settlements of their employment contracts,
some of which total millions of dollars. Since December,
Walker Digital has sold about two-thirds of its stake in
Priceline, for about $9.2 million, to help fund operations.

"Jay Walker is focusing his energy on rebuilding Walker
Digital, not building the house," Mr. Goldman says.

Write to Julia Angwin at [e-mail]

http://public.wsj.com/sn/y/SB982886414558101113.html

[guuruh]

Are patents misused?
March 20, 2001 12:00 AM ET
by Upside.com Staff

Defendants: NCR (NCR),
Amazon.com (AMZN) and
Priceline.com (PCLN)

The charges:

Trying to enforce a patent on a widely adopted technology
or business method

Attempting to stifle innovation by controlling the market
through patents

The prosecution:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
what would you say if I were to tell
you that during the defining days of
the modern courtroom, a lawyer had
won a patent for the phrase "ladies
and gentlemen of the jury" as it is
used in the opening statement of a
court hearing? What if I also told you
that every lawyer who ever used the
phrase in his opening statement was
to pay royalties to the holder of such
a patent?

You would find it absurd, because it`s
an absurd concept to patent a
method of operation. Equally absurd
are the many examples of patented
business methods in the arena of
Internet commerce and computer
technology.

We are in this courtroom today
because we have already seen such
absurdity in US Patent No. 5,960,411,
Amazon`s so called "One-Click"
shopping technology -- which lets
shoppers buy items with a single
mouseclick -- and U.S. Patent No.
5,794,207, the
"name-your-own-price" commerce bidding system
developed by Priceline.com.

Most recently, we have seen NCR, a company that makes
automatic teller machines and handheld pricing modules,
claim that two 13-year-old patents it holds for a device that
sounds vaguely similar to today`s PDA (Personal Digital
Assistants) are being infringed upon by Palm (PALM) and
Handspring (HAND).

This patent terrorism that Amazon, Priceline and most
recently NCR are engaging in clearly illustrates a plague that
threatens the advancement of innovation. These companies
are using the patent office`s naïve understanding of new
technology as a method to systematically stamp out any
competition.

The truth is: These companies should not have received
patents for these common procedures in the first place.

We must stop this trend of overprotection through patents.
And we must hold responsible these three companies, which
attempt to validate such a strategy.

The defense:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me begin by assuring you
that I, nor any other lawyer, will ever pay a penny to use such
a ubiquitous phrase. But that is not what we are arguing here
today.

We are here to decide a case that will ultimately protect the
rights of every citizen who struggles to build a business and
innovate in this competitive market. My clients, Amazon.com,
Priceline.com and NCR, have all strived to do just that. It is
your duty as a jury to protect them, under the laws governed
by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, from carpetbaggers
who attempt to build a business on the sweat of their
inventions.

Listen to the testimony of the hard-working inventors who are
being challenged in this court. The defense enters into
evidence the testimony of Priceline.com founder Jay Walker
from May 1999 when his company won a second patent for
its commerce technology.

"Historically, most patents have focused on narrowly defined
technologies and products," Walker said. "With recent U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office and court affirmations regarding
the patentability of business methods, a company now has the
ability to protect not only its business products but the actual
methods employed in bringing them to market.

"This recognition of patent protection creates the incentive for
exciting and significant innovation in U.S. businesses, and will
play a central role in enabling a new generation of businesses
to emerge and flourish, both on the Internet and off."

Likewise, the defense enters into evidence testimony from
Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos from a statement he
made when his company challenged and won the initial case
against Barnes & Noble.com (BNBN) for blatantly
reproducing its patented check-out technology.

"We spent thousands of hours to develop our One-Click
process The reason we have a patent system in this country
is to encourage people to take these kinds of risks and make
these kinds of investments for customers," he said.

He could not be more right. This industry has already seen the
effects of technology gone awry when unprotected by the
laws that govern patents. It is the story of the Xerox`s (XRX)
PARC graphical user interface, a revolutionary concept that
was used by competitors because Xerox failed to take the
same cautious measures as my clients through patent
protection.

We must not forget that there are many clear winners thanks
to the PTO. The defense enters into evidence the March 12
BusinessWeek cover story featuring Gemstar-TV Guide
(GMST) Chairman and CEO Henry Yuen, a champion of the
patent system.

Yuen`s development of the onscreen interactive television
program guide, and his concise patenting of every technology
and concept his company creates, has made his company
impervious to any competitor who would like to capitalize on
the success of his company. And believe me, competitors
have attempted to strip Yuen of his inventions.

Thanks to his patents, Yuen now collects royalties from nearly
every cable and television technology company that have
tried to steal his ideas for thier own gain.

Similar to my three clients, Yuen`s legal efforts to protect his
intellectual property has riled so much angst from competitors
that he is often described as a "patent terrorist."

"I am no terrorist," Yuen told BusinessWeek. "A terrorist is
someone who breaks the law. I am only doing what the U.S.
Congress and patent law allow."

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my clients are not practicing
terrorism but merely protecting themselves in a tumultuous and
competitive business landscape.

Guilty or not guilty?

cheers, guuruh

[Steve de Ville]

Hmmmmm...

merkwürdig seid 3 Tagen gehen große Pakete
zwischen 75000 und über 100000 Aktien nachbörslich
für über Kurs liegende Preise über die Theke.
Und das bei relativ ruhigem Handel.

sag was soll es bedeuten.
wer hat soviel geld
wer hat soviel pinke pinke auf der ganzen Weld
(Lied)oder so
lol

gruß Steve de Ville heut mal lustig

[ALong]

Kommt pcln jemals nochmal mit dem Hintern richtig aus dem Quark???
Meinungen erbeten!

Danke und so long!

[guuruh]

schon bekannt, aber nochmals auf Deutsch

cheers, guuruh

===

Montag, 02.04.2001, 15:56

Priceline bestätigt Prognosen

Das Internetkommerz-Unternehmen
Priceline.com Inc. hat am Montag seine
Prognosen für das erste und zweite Quartal des
laufenden Geschäftsjahres bestätigt, die es im
Februar gemacht hat.

Der Umsatz im ersten Quartal wird somit voraussichtlich unverändert um 15-20 Prozent
von den 228,2 Mio. Dollar im vierten Quartal steigen. Der Verlust im ersten Quartal wird
bei 5-7 Cents pro Aktie erwartet.

Auch im zweiten Quartal rechnet das Unternehmen mit einem Umsatzwachstum von 15-20
Prozent gegenüber dem ersten Quartal. Außerdem prognostiziert man einen Gewinn im
zweiten Quartal, ausschließlich Umstrukturierungs-Kosten und anderen
Sonderbelastungen.

Die Aktien von Priceline.com schlossen am Freitag an der Nasdaq bei 2-17/32 Dollar. Sie
schwankten in 52 Wochen zwischen 86 Dollar und 1-1/16 Dollar.

[guuruh]

G. Bush will die US-Buerger und Wirtschaft in den naechsten
10 Jahren um 1600 Mld USD (kein Fehler: 1.6 * 10^12 USD) entlasten;
bereits 2002 soll es zu einer Entlastung um 29 Mld kommen.

Nur eine Dauerrezession ueber ein Paar Jahre waere
wachstumbremsend und der Schuss geht nach Hinten.
Tritt diese nicht ein, erhoeht sich BSP zusaetzlich
um 10 Proz am Ende der Zeitperiode von 10 Jahren.

Da Greenspan irgendwie die Boersen nicht mehr beeindruecken kann,
muss ein neuer Kick her. Vorsichtiger Clinton war gut,
Bush scheint trotz Starwars und China ebenso.

Hoffend auf die Durchsetzung,
cheers, guuruh

[guuruh]

Wednesday April 11, 9:10 am Eastern Time

Press Release

Priceline.com To Hold 1st Quarter Conference Call On May 1

NORWALK, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 11, 2001--Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN - news) will release its 1st quarter
2001 financial results after the market-close on Tuesday, May 1.

Following the release of this information, the Company will host a conference call for institutional investors and analysts at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Accredited journalists and members of the public will be able to listen to the presentation and question-and-answer session.

Analysts and institutions who wish to participate in the call should dial 1-800-482-5519 domestically and 303-267-1001 internationally 10 to 15 minutes
before the 5:00 p.m. conference call, and reference priceline.com. Journalists and members of the public should call 800-482-2225 domestically and
303-267-1002 internationally 10 to 15 minutes prior to the conference call and reference priceline.com. The conference call also will be Web-cast from the
priceline.com investor relations Web site (www.priceline.com).

For anyone not able to participate on May 1, there will be a telephone replay service available for five days after the call. The replay can be accessed by dialing
800-625-5288 domestically and 303-804-1855 internationally referencing #1001717. A digital recording of the call also will be available on priceline.com`s
investor relations Web site (www.priceline.com) for five days after the call. The conference call discussion reflects management`s views as of May 1, 2001.

[guuruh]

wir werden heute ein Kursfeuerwerk erleben...

Goldman Sachs raised its rating on the e-commerce company

cheers, guuruh


NEW YORK (CBS.MW) - Shares of Priceline.com soared to
six-month highs in pre-open trading Tuesday after Goldman Sachs
upgraded the shares ahead of its first-quarter report.

The stock (PCLN: news, msgs, alerts)
powered up $1.65, or 34 percent, to $6.50.
Analyst Anthony Noto raised its rating on
the shares to "market outperform" from
"market perform," citing an improved
outlook. He feels management has "right
sized the business, improved customer
service and stabilized growth." He thinks
the company will demonstrate that the
worst is behind it when it report first
quarter results Tuesday.