One Company Is Still Buying Up E-tailers.While the mere mention of e-commerce sends many of Wall Street's brightest to duck and cover Duck and Cover was a suggested method of personal protection against the effects of a nuclear detonation which the United States government taught to generations of United States school children from the late 1940s into the 1980s. , one company is buying up e-tailers faster than you can say dot-com. Sitestar Corp., a year-old startup, now has three e-commerce companies in its fold, and just made an offer for a fourth. The acquisitions, part of a strategy to acquire a stable of niche e-tailers and Internet service providers Internet service provider (ISP) Company that provides Internet connections and services to individuals and organizations. For a monthly fee, ISPs provide computer users with a connection to their site (see data transmission), as well as a log-in name and password. at sharply discounted prices, may seem odd, even ill-advised, in a market where many e-commerce companies are wobbling wobbling Vox populi Ataxia, see there on the precipice of extinction and ISP's are not making any money. But Sitestar executives have a different view. "You haven't seen a great deal of the potential of e-commerce," said Clinton J. Sallee, president and chief executive of the Encino-based firm. "The ISP (1) See in-system programmable. (2) (Internet Service Provider) An organization that provides access to the Internet. Connection to the user is provided via dial-up, ISDN, cable, DSL and T1/T3 lines. strategy is certainly the backbone, but the (other) component is what we affectionately af·fec·tion·ate adj. 1. Having or showing fond feelings or affection; loving and tender. 2. Obsolete Inclined or disposed. af·fec call opportunistic opportunistic /op·por·tu·nis·tic/ (op?er-tldbomacn-is´tik) 1. denoting a microorganism which does not ordinarily cause disease but becomes pathogenic under certain circumstances. 2. investing." Sallee and his partner, Eric T. Manlunas, are buying up depressed companies at bargain prices, scaling them down and hoping to make a bundle when the market picks back up, either by selling or spinning them off. The only difference between Sitestar and the investors of the 1980s is the size of the deals. The three e-commerce companies Sitestar has acquired are tiny niche companies with annual sales of less than $100,000: Soccersite.com, a Web site that sells soccer-related equipment; greattools.com, which sells tools; and Holland-American.com, an e-tailer of foods from the Netherlands. |
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