INTERNET STOCK ZENITH GETS A GREAT RECEPTION.

Byline: Floyd Norris The New York Times

Zenith Electronics has a grand brand name and a lot of red ink. Now it also has a hot stock.

On Monday, Zenith shares leapt $7.125, to $22.875, after their opening on the New York Stock Exchange was delayed for 19 minutes by a surge of buy orders. That came after the stock soared last week.

Zenith, largely on the strength of a couple of press releases last week, has been reclassified by stock traders. No longer is it just a money-losing maker of television sets. Now it is an Internet stock. And it is one that many investors have heard of, even if its recent past has been far from glorious.

Over the past six trading days, Zenith has climbed $16.75, or 273 percent, on volume of more than 47 million shares. That volume vastly exceeds the 27 million shares of Zenith in public hands, and helps explain the price movements. There has been a flurry of buying, much of it from small retail buyers.

``It's amazing what the market thinks we are doing,'' said Albin F. Moschner, Zenith's president and chief executive, in an interview Monday. He declined to discuss the stock price beyond that, but emphasized that while the company's announcements last week addressed ``a potential market,'' it would be at least a year or two ``before this becomes substantial, if it does at all.''

Zenith, a U.S. company with most of its production in Mexico and controlled by a Korean company, has been plagued by shrinking sales and growing losses.

In addition to its television set business, Zenith has long been in the cable television equipment business, making set-top boxes, and in the small field of cable modems, which allow users to connect to computers via cable instead of telephone lines. But those modems work only in the small number of cable TV systems wired for two-way communications.

Last week, however, Zenith and U.S. Robotics, a modem maker, announced a new system that would provide access to the Internet via one-way cable systems.