Event Summary
Chemdex Corp.
(NASDAQ: CMDX) announced that it will restructure itself with a new name and
mission. The $30.8 million vertical marketplace company with lines in life sciences
and medical chemicals and equipment will become an Internet incubator, leveraging
its existing technology to build other vertical marketplaces.
The
new company will be called Ventro and will trade under the symbol VNTR.
Market
Impact
It
is hard to argue with the success of a company whose one-year revenues jumped
a massive 30,700% percent. Even better, Chemdex recently cheered investors with
fourth quarter gross revenues of $19.3 million, 160 percent of analyst estimates,
and losses of only 47 cents per share, 2 per cent better than predicted.
The
company poses a potentially formidable challenger to VerticalNet. E-procurement
is only one aspect of VerticalNet's 50 industry-specific sites, which also offer
catalog services and other content. Should Ventro decide to enhance its sites
with the same kind of free material VerticalNet could easily be swamped.
However,
a content site does not necessarily attract buyers for the larger corporations,
so a real challenge in this space is more likely to come from VerticalNet choosing
to change its focus to attract higher volumes of commerce than from Ventro choosing
to fish for individual buys.
User
Recommendations
Users should cheer. Having a savvy successful company make a mission out of
creating superior vertical marketplaces will advance the state of the art and
the levels of competition. This simply provides more reason for companies that
are not exploring E-procurement opportunities to do so.