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Alta Vista delays IPO
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April 17, 2000: 11:56 a.m. ET
Internet portal postpones initial offering due to volatile market conditions
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - AltaVista, the Internet portal, postponed its planned initial public offering Monday due to market conditions, according to lead underwriter Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.
The company was to offer 14.8 million shares, valued at $255 million, which were to be priced this week. AltaVista officials were not immediately available for comment.
AltaVista joins a series of other companies that have cancelled IPOs because of depressed market conditions, but since it is larger and more established than many of the others, its decision to postpone stands out as a sign of more bad news for the markets and the high-tech sector.
"AltaVista was one of the name-brand companies on the docket, and it's controlled by CMGI (CMGI: Research, Estimates), and they felt right now is not the best time to float an initial public offering," Jeffrey Hirschkorn, IPO analyst of IPO.com, told CNNfn's "Before the Bell."
"They went into the old cliché, owing to the market conditions. And that is basically going to hurt the market right now. That was one of the headlining deals on this week's calendar. It was supposed to price tonight through Morgan Stanley. That's definitely a setback," Hirschkorn said.
AltaVista, one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, had revenue of $50.9 million in the three months ended Jan. 31, and has been rapidly growing its audience through a subsidiary company that offers free Internet access.
 Since last summer, AltaVista has been majority-owned by the successful Internet incubator CMGI Inc., which aggressively marketed the site and worked to transform it from a bare-bones search engine to a major commercial portal.
In its latest quarter, ended in January, it had a loss of more than $272 million.
Although AltaVista was one of the original Internet search engines, its timing with investors has been bad. It first tried to go public in 1996, in a deal that also was cancelled because of weak market conditions. It later was acquired by Compaq Computer Corp. (CPQ: Research, Estimates)., which spun it off last year. 
--from staff and wire reports
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