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Lycos Sold To South Korean Company

Posted by timothy on from the profit-and-loss dept.

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."

4 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Now you know why the bubble burst by bigberk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by weiyuent · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

  2. Re:So is this method not working? by nomadic · · Score: 4, Insightful

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