Internet Update
Dateline: 06/11/99
Not all Canadian Internet stocks are publicly traded. In fact, some of the best ones are privately held or are 100% owned by other companies. A good example of the latter is Sympatico, Canada's largest Internet Service Provider, which is owned by a partnership of Canada's major telephone companies. If the telcos decide to spin it off as a separate publicly traded company, it would be worth taking a look at.
But some of the gems are not so well known. Here follows short profiles on three private companies that will be interesting to watch and perhaps invest in if they go public.
Hoffmann & Associates: The brainchild of creative entrepreneur Isabel Hoffmann, H&A is a leading developer of children's and family content for major Internet portals including CBS, Netscape, America Online and Canoe with its Nikolai Adventure Series. It runs two online e-commerce sites, its Store4Kids and hastore.com, which sells its products on CD-ROM. H&A also owns distribution rights for a collection of multi-media titles produced by Bill Gates' Corbis company (one of his less well-known but equally excellent sidelines). And they have bought the entire interactive multimedia division of Corel Corporation (CD Home Line and Corel Medical Series).
Hoffmann and Associates is working in partnership with Cinar Corporation at present to develop an animated television series based on the Nikolai characters. The company and Ms. Hoffman have won numerous awards and the company was 15th on Deloitte & Touche's Fast Fifty-Five list of the fastest growing Canadian technology companies last year.
Oasis Technologies Limited: Number 22 on the Fast 55 last year, Oasis is a leading developer of e-commerce payment systems on the Unix and NT platforms. By the end of 1993 its client roster included ABN Amro, American Express, The Bank of Montreal, Citibank, Diners, Europay, MasterCard and Visa. In February of this year the company signed an agreement with IBM "to introduce Oasis E-commerce payment products to IBM clientele throughout North America".
Oasis's IST/IMN (Inter Member Network) product is the only Unix based software solution providing direct access to the Interac system of Direct Payment for Canadian retailers.
In 1997, Oasis topped Profit Magazine's list of the fastest growing companies in Canada. Its growth rate for the five years from 1991-1996 was in excess of 10,000%. Only days ago the company made the Profit 100 list again for the third year in a row. The company is global in scope and operations and in 1998 won the FedEx Exporting Award for the second year running. Watch for this one if it ever goes public!
Numetrix: Numetrix is the developer of "a leading edge Internet application that facilitates collaboration between companies and optimizes their supply/demand networks". Their Xtr@ software was one of twelve applications chosen as the Best Software of 1998 by the French technical publication Industries et Techniques.
Industry publication Manufacturing Systems listed Numetrix as one of the Top 100 Software Vendors in 1998 as well. And the company was named one of the Fifty Best Managed privately owned companies in 1998 by The Financial Post for the third year running. It was number 22 on the Fast 55 list last year. Again, a company to watch if it goes public.
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E-Commerce Central - Oasis keeps you up-to-date on e-commerce trends and news with this informative page.
Internet Sourcebook - This interesting and useful site lets you narrow down searches on Internet companies with various parameters including country.
High Tech Links - my collection of High Tech Links at Investing: Canada.
Canadian Internet Stock Average - my charts of Canadian Internet stocks and how they have fared since January First.
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