Lycos Sold To South Korean Company

maggeth writes "Terra Networks has finally decided to dump its struggling web portal, Lycos, to the South Korean-based Daum Communications Corp. Terra bought Lycos for $12.5 billion and they managed to sell if for $105 million. More details at the story on eWeek."

Comments

Now you know why the bubble burst

[bigberk]

If someone actually thought that Lycos was worth $12.5 billion, you have a pretty good idea how messed up people were in the 90s, and why the bubble burst. A bunch of 'companies' creating no products, acting as nothing more than advertising and marketing information hubs, fooled millions of investors. Bravo, you sirs were truly kings.

Re:Now you know why the bubble burst

[weiyuent]

If someone actually thought that Lycos was worth $12.5 billion, you have a pretty good idea how messed up people were in the 90s, and why the bubble burst.

Thing is though, everything else was massively inflated too. Terra Networks bought Lycos in 2000, in an all stock deal. So really, the $12.5 billion is just paper value. Who knows how much hard cash was actually burned -- not insubstantial but certainly much less than $12 billion.

Re:Now you know why the bubble burst

[saden1]

What is Google really worth? And will it be worth what it is worth today 5 years from now. Wall Street should be called Speculation Street. You win some, you lose some. Google is flying high now but no one can guarantee it will continue to.

Re:Now you know why the bubble burst

[Anonymous Coward]

The article doesn't go into details, but I highly doubt that $12.5B of real money was involved. I would imagine that the deal was done with the dot.com version of Monopoly(tm) money, swapping inflated stock. The stock transferred by the companies might have had an astronomical "market value", but if they had actually tried to sell the stock on the open market to convert it to cash, the value would have nosedived. All of this "market value" would have been generated by a handful of fools buying a tiny fraction of the total stock at outrageous prices; the $billions may never have existed in any real form.

Thus, the main value of such stock is to trade for other equally inflated stock, just like the main value of a $500 Monopoly bill is for buying little fake plastic hotels.

Re:Now you know why the bubble burst

[timeOday]

Wall Street should be called Speculation Street. You win some, you lose some.

So what's the take home lesson here? Don't buy stock that will go down? Why didn't I think of that.

It's easy to say "don't take a risk, just keep slaving away in your cube for that guaranteed $55K/year," especially after a company crashes and burns. But to escape the treadmill you must place your bets at some point. So how do you do that shrewdly? If you wait until it's a "sure thing," it's surely too late.

Terra is that strong?

[usefool]

I must say if a company can lose more than $10 billion and still alive and kicking, it's actually not doing too badly.

This is proof of Wall Street's 'casino mentality'

[iamcf13]

How much is a company really worth when all the BS is stripped away?...

Re:So is this method not working?

[nomadic]

Considering someone sold it for 12 billion, I can assure you that somewhere a very nice profit was made.