Wieviel Verlust schreibt razorfish?? - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[thomy18]

Hallo! Weiß das wer??

[fsch]

http://biz.yahoo.com/p/r/razf.html

[web2000]

As a result of this revised outlook, the company expects a pro forma net loss per share (before amortization of intangibles and a restructuring charge) between ($0.17) and ($0.22) for the quarter ended December 31, 2000.
(RAZF PR-Mitteilung zum 4.Quartal)

cashburn: erwartete 21-30 Mio.$ per Quartal

Cash:84 Mio.$ am 30.09.2000


When dot.coms tanked, they dragged most of their consultants with them. Now a few are clawing their
way out of the mire

FOR most industries that run into trouble, the only sure winners are consultants. Cleaning up other people’s
messes—or at least promising to—is usually one of the few recession-proof businesses around. But not with the
Internet. As dot.coms have plummeted this year, their consultants have fallen even faster. The share prices of
many of the top 15 listed Internet consultancies have dropped by 90% or more this year, making even e-tailers
look good. They have among them already laid off more than 3,200 people in the past three months, including 380
at Xpedior on December 5th. Several face Nasdaq delisting, if bankruptcy does not come first.

The reasons for this demise are familiar, but rarely seen to such a degree: reckless overexpansion, profligacy, poor
management, lack of focus and hype. Some of the consultancies never outgrew their trendy web-design origins,
even as demand shifted to serious corporate strategy and database programming. Too many staked their fortunes
on dot.coms and ended up swallowing unpaid bills and worthless equity. Others assumed that there would always
be more business than they could handle and waited too long to build a marketing and sales staff.

“Roll-ups”, such as iXL and marchFIRST, which were formed by the merger of mid-sized firms and the acquisition of
smaller ones, became case studies in failed integration and culture conflicts. Worse, these companies spent as if
they were actually worth the many billions that their share prices fleetingly implied. The story of the half-tonne dot
on the “i” that fell off iXL’s huge sign at its magnificent Atlanta headquarters will haunt the firm for the rest of its
(probably short) life.

But as with shake-outs in the rest of the dot.com world, the cloud has a silver lining. What was once a baffling
industry, with dozens of firms all promising e-business transformation and transcendental strategic thinking, is now
reduced to a rather more digestible shape. Naturally, several losers will go bust; then there are the struggling firms
that need time to stabilise before they can take on another big project; and atop this pile are a few relatively solid
companies whose main crime is being in the same business as the likes of iXL.

How to tell them all apart? Sadly, a glance at consultants’ share prices (see
chart) does not inspire much confidence in any of them: even the best has
lost more than half its value over the past year. But in many cases this
says more about the absurd hopes of investors, dazzled by the growth of
web-consulting, than about the industry itself.

Less than a year ago, marchFIRST alone was worth nearly $13 billion, not
much less than the consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the
big five accounting firms, which was valued at about $18 billion earlier this
year when Hewlett-Packard made a play for it. Not bad, considering that
marchFIRST was losing more than $100m a quarter and sinking further into
the red with each day. Now the firm is worth just over $200m. If it cannot
raise more cash in the next month, it may soon be worth nothing.

A better indicator of success is how far consultancies have managed to distance themselves from their dot.com
origins. An analysis by Greg Gore of W.R. Hambrecht, an investment bank, shows that the shake-out in the
business has divided it into two groups, which he dubs “Tier One” and “The Rest”. Tier One firms, which include
DiamondCluster International, Sapient, Scient, Proxicom and Inforte, have over the past year shifted their business
more than the others to big traditional firms that tend to contract out big projects and pay their bills on time.

But cosying up to the Fortune 500 is not enough to save the consultancies. For a start, the dot.com crunch has
affected old bricks-and-mortar firms, too. With fewer venture-funded start-ups threatening to put them out of
business, big traditional companies feel in less of a panic to do something. So they are spending less on
web-strategy consultants, and doing more work internally (it is also a lot easier to find dot.com refugees who are
only too happy to have a little job security these days). Revenue growth from such customers, which should now
be the bread and butter of the business, rose by only 4% in the third quarter, reckons Mr Gore. That is not terrible
by traditional consulting standards, but far below the Internet consultancies’ aspirations a year ago.

No more nose rings

Meanwhile, the technology industry has grown up. Projects that once needed to be hand-crafted by outside
experts can now be bought as off-the-shelf offerings from firms such as Ariba and I2. The flashy web designs that
were the hallmark of “nose-ring” New York firms such as Razorfish are now seen as slow and confusing; Yahoo!’s
credo of fast, functional and boring has won the day. Nokia chose Razorfish to design the front end of its first
website, but when the time came to build the back-end links to the rest of its business it chose NerveWire, which
is run by former consultants with Cambridge Technology Partners, an older, more conservative company.

The best consultancies, such as Sapient, Viant and Scient, have long served big listed firms. But the worst have
now had to announce radical restructuring to follow their example. Along with its layoffs and office closures,
marchFIRST is in the process of jettisoning its 1,000 smallest clients to focus on its biggest. “I screwed up,” Robert
Bernard, its chief executive, told an investors’ conference last month. “We had too much dependence on the
dot.coms. I’m out of that business by January 1st.”

Along with the cutbacks, marchFIRST, like other former high-fliers, is shifting from a branch-office structure to one
organised by industry. This makes sense; indeed, the big five consultancies went through a similar shift a decade
ago. But they were able to do so on their own terms, as private partnerships; the web consultancies must pull off
the same trick in the glare of the public markets. Mr Gore expects most of the companies in the bottom half of the
industry to fail before they can turn around.

As for the rest, however, the future may be brighter than their share-price falls suggest. There is still plenty of
work to go round. Moreover, for all their advantages, the big five traditional consultancies are seen as unwieldy;
and they suffer from a reputation for pitching a partner’s grand strategy to clients, then leaving them with
ill-trained junior people to do the work. There is a place for specialised consultancies that focus on just a few
industries. None of them, however, should expect to be worth $13 billion again any time soon.




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regards
steve