| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JULY 26, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| FINANCE
If the Investor Won't Go to the Road Show... Road shows are the bread and butter of investment banking. Corporate executives travel throughout the country to promote the virtues of their companies' latest stock or debt offerings. Now, executives are also traveling in cyberspace, and the company that's doing a lot of the transporting is an outfit called NetRoadshow. Based in Atlanta, NetRoadshow is run by entrepreneur Brad Hammond, 46, formerly in institutional sales at Robinson-Humphrey Co. He got the idea in 1995, but it took him about two years and a letter from the Securities & Exchange Commission to get the business under way. In 1998, NetRoadshow broadcast about 132 productions for clients, including Bear Stearns, Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, and Goldman Sachs. Here's how it works: NetRoadshow sends out film crews to tape the company presentation before the investment bank's institutional sales force. Then a Web version is created. Management appears on the left side of a computer screen, talking about synchronized slides that flash on the right side. The investment bank hands out a password to clients, who can review the road show at their leisure. Bankers get information on who watched the road show and for how long. Then they follow up with sales calls. ''We've seen their effectiveness grow each and every day we've used them,'' says Michael T. Ott, head of equity capital markets at Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown Inc. OPTIONS. So far this year, NetRoadshow has done 418 such events. The top-of-the-line NetRoadshow, which includes audio and telephone options for users with slow Net connections, goes for as much as $20,000, says Hammond. In the second quarter of '99, NetRoadshow did more than $2 million in sales and is ''very profitable,'' he says. In January, broadcast.com (BCST), a leading broadcaster of streaming media on the Web, agreed to acquire NetRoadshow for $50 million in broadcast.com stock. On Apr. 1, Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) announced it was acquiring broadcast.com, sparking a run in the stock Hammond received. ''It worked out great for me, but it also worked out great for them,'' he says. ''Some of the most important eyeballs in the investing world are looking at our material daily.'' Today, about 85% of Hammond's business is road shows. But he plans to go beyond road shows to sell Internet broadcasts of quarterly earnings announcements, investor conferences, and analyst presentations. ''We're quickly expanding into other stuff,'' he says. Hammond isn't the only one to have the idea of holding electronic road shows. Competitors include Bloomberg LP and NextVenue. And the roster of rivals will grow as NetRoadshow does more kinds of financial Web broadcasts. But with strong relationships forged with top investment banks and backing from Yahoo! and broadcast.com, NetRoadshow is poised to become a bigger part of Wall Street's Internet game plan. By Amey Stone in New York _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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