Flocking to the dot.com party

Dot.com has become a password to instant success in Western equity markets. Since the arrival of Netscape on the market five years ago, the market has been flooded with new technology issues which have fundamentally distorted market performance.

In 1998/99, for instance, the value of Internet stocks soared 400 per cent against just short of 20 per cent for the more traditional US indices - the Dow Jones and the Standard & Poor's 500.

That explains the rush by more traditional media companies and others to reinvent themselves as dot.coms. In Ireland, two dramatic examples have been Independent News & Media, whose shares have jumped 36 per cent from €7.96 to €10.80 in the 10 days since it announced the provision of Internet access via television to cable customers, and Fyffes, whose business-to-business web service has seen the share shake off the blues which dogged it for so long and rise from €1.65 to €3.85. This week BSkyB showed even newish media companies are not immune to the needs to upgrade on technology. Announcing an interim loss of £61.5 million sterling compared with a profit of £53.2 million in the previous year, its stock surged by more than 20 per cent on the day to record highs.

Why? Quite simple. The market could not have cared less what the results said once the company announced it was to invest £250 million sterling to boost its presence online.

The same strategy has already bolstered the fortunes of two other media giants - Reuters and Pearson. If only turning a profit were so easy.