Asia Catches .Com Fever

Then things got stormy. In a swift year-end deal, Cheung Kong Holdings, billionaire Li's flagship, paid an estimated $5 million for a 2% stake in Timeless. In turn, Timeless agreed to invest $23 million in new offices in the Center, a top-drawer Cheung Kong development. In the old economy, a deal with one of Asia's richest men would have marked one's arrival among the local business elite. But to many investors, Timeless suddenly looked less like a go-go technology firm than an old-fashioned real estate play.

"Is it a software-systems integrator or a property investor?" asks Internet analyst David Webb, publisher of Webb-site.com He says the office-space purchase deal represents 40% of the IPO proceeds and violates Timeless' prospectus, which pledges to allocate funds raised to working capital. Cheng defends the deal. Still, the market needs convincing. On the first day of listing, Timeless stock peaked at 99[cents]. But by the end of last month, it was down to 71[cents].

Cheng is projecting a $2.6 million profit for the fiscal year ending March 31, after cumulative losses of $7.7 million racked up during Timeless' first three years. Listing on NASDAQ has not been ruled out. To do that, however, Cheng will have to turn the heads of U.S. investors with flashier results--not just a prestigious office address.

the sellout [dot] com AN INDIAN PORTAL TURNS INTO A QUICK CONVERSION TO CASH

Rajesh Jain made one of India's biggest business deals of 1999--and ran. Before the score that netted him $115 million, Jain, 32, operated a website known as IndiaWorld, which posted local news and sports scores, primarily for Indians living overseas. His 20 staff members were squeezed into a 970-sq-ft. warren in downtown Bombay. Profits were minimal. But last fall Jain hit a cosmic payday when he sold his portal company, IndiaWorld Communications, to Satyam Infoway, an Indian Internet service provider listed on NASDAQ. The $115 million deal--one of the biggest Internet transactions involving two Asian companies--gave Jain instant celebrity, a whopping bank account and a desire to leave the Internet rat race, at least for a while, to enjoy his winnings.

Jain taught Asia what Silicon Valley has known for a long time: though going public is a fabulous way to cash in on the Internet, selling out to someone else can be a sure-fire moneymaker too. Satyam Infoway wanted content popular with overseas Indians to complement its own domestically oriented portal. IndiaWorld was pulling most of its 13 million monthly page views from outside the country. Jain got an unusual windfall because Satyam Infoway is paying the entire purchase price in cash, not in stock, which is more typical in such deals. His initial investment was $50,000.

It was second-time lucky for Jain, who trained to be an engineer at Columbia University. In 1995, Ravi Database, the software-services company he founded in 1992, went broke. Chastened, Jain embarked on a soul-searching sabbatical in the U.S. What he found was inspiration. Jain noticed that thousands of Indian expatriates had little access to news from home. He figured the Internet was the ideal delivery system.