Mr. von Rheinbaben: We founded the company about eight years ago, it's one of the pioneering companies in electronic publishing and e-commerce trade. By 1997 we actually started doing e-commerce over the Internet with electronic products, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and so on. And by the end of 1997, we started the buecher.de e-business, selling books over the Internet business. We had a database of 100,000 clients already, which made our start easier than it would have been if you started at grassroots, basically. We had 100,000 addresses of people we knew were very high-tech oriented: they had PCs, they had CD-ROM drives, they, obviously, had an Internet account. They were people that we knew were very interested in content: they had been purchasing encyclopaedias, language courses, multimedia products, so we knew they were interested in contact. And, finally, we knew that they were of a relatively high education, relatively high-income status, so we knew that we could sell books and other content products to them. So we started with the domain, buecher.de, meaning, books.com, in Germany in 1997. We were already the clear number two in the market by the beginning of 1998. We then went to a couple of venture capital rounds before going to the stock exchange, and on the 5th of July 1999, buecher.de's IPO was quoted in the German stock exchange, at the Neuer Markt. The issue was over-subscribed 110 times: it was an amazing over-subscription of the share price, which was one of the reasons why the share price went so high, it sky-rocketed over the first days and then came down to a level around EUR25. Right now, we're at 15. We strongly believe it's undervalued. Since then, we've done a couple of acquisitions. We've acquired the largest antiquarian database in Europe, for antiquarian books. We have acquired the number one online book centre in Switzerland, and we acquired the best music online shop in Germany. So within seven months we've done quite substantial activities. We had revenues of DEM3 million, about $1.5 million in 1998, and we finished 1999 with a compounded revenue of all companies involved, of about DEM19 million, what it is, almost $10 million. So we have sextupled revenues, and are the leading number two company in the German-speaking countries for content: meaning book, music, downloadable music, information on certain contents and are still expanding and will be expanding into non-German-speaking European countries within the next couple of months.
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