According to a report in Business and Finance magazine, Eircom wants to float its losing internet and multimedia interests on the NASDAQ and Irish stock exchanges. The core profitable businesses of Eircom are fixed line and mobile telephony. The internet aspect along with the multimedia operation "rondomondo" do not seem to be that profitable. However inspired by other flotations of internet services such as Dixon´s Freeserve, Eircom wants to get in on the act and sell what is effectively a lame duck to a new bunch of investors. Eircom has denied that it is trying to float the internet/multimedia division and claimed that this is all just a big realignment of its ISP section.

The people in Eircom seem to value this venture at £250 Million. It also has contracted a design agency to rebrand the new group. Hopefully this rebranding will be more successful than the Eircom rebranding - aircom.com and aircom.net are all owned by other companies so that idiotic argument about American´s mistaking "Telecom Eireann" for "Telecom Iran" just doesn´t hold water. What kind of unconnected fool would rebrand an net company that doesn´t own the most common spelling of its domain name (eircom.net - aircom.net) ?

The new venture will be headed by Noel Herrarty. Three new directors have been appointed to the division, Fintan Lawler, manager of Eircom.net; Mark Beggs, manager of Indigo and Aidan Finnegan.

The Business and Finance article claimed that the combined users figure for Eircom was 200,000 and that it had 65% of the available ISP market share. This is clearly innaccurate as IOL/Esat is the biggest ISP. However theses figures do not break down into actual subscribers - most of them will be floating users who use the Indigo GoFree Free ISP. These users cannot be considered subscribers in the traditional sense since they are far more likely to change ISPs since they are not locked in to any of them. Free ISPs are also exceedingly vulnerable to market fluctuations since there is no exclusive knowledge or selling point. Anyone with enough money to burn can set one up. This is why Eircom sacrificed the Indigo brandname rather than the Eircom.net one by having its free ISP branded an Indigo product.

When Eircom floated last year, the price of the stock soared as thousands of people who had never invested in anything in their lives bought shares. Some of these people sold at the top of the market but the majority got hammered when the share price fell to below the flotation value. Radio talk shows were plagued with irate Eircom investors demanding compensation for their losses. Eircom is a vastly overstaffed operation and is stuck in the post-bureaucratic lethargy. The internet operations reflect that poverty of imagination.

Eircom´s track record on the internet has been problematic. It was the greatest single hinderance to the uptake of the internet in the early days. Then it launched its Tinet service which never really got the number of subscribers that it needed to be viable. Realising this, in 1997 the management made a very shrewd move and bought the number two ISP in Ireland, Indigo. At that time Indigo had debt problems of its own. No ISP in Ireland ever made enough money from dialup customers to be successful. The combined Tinet/Indigo operation certainly made up the numbers. It was common knowledge that the Tinet purchase was strictly a numbers deal.

The multimedia side of things is even more problematic. While the internet services have long term prospects of making money, Eircom has been less than successful in their web/multimedia ventures. The single most stupid acquisition was that of Local Ireland. Local Ireland has all the imagination of a phone directory on the internet. It was created by Nua in a vain attempt to ape an online service. The problem is that the people in Nua never had a clue about how an online service worked. Of course Nua know how to package things for the simple minded and it was probably sold on the basis of how many users it could get in the future. It is a husk of template HTML with no sound financial grip on commercial reality.

The other web publications that make up Eircom´s portfolio are Doras (a poorly designed search engine), Muse (a music magazine) and Cumasc (an Irish language magazine. Doras is so insanely structured that most of the hits seem to come from people trying to get back up from the depths to the home page. The reviews are of dubious accuracy and are executed by freelancers for a pittance. The other magazines have potential but Muse has a lot of competition on the web.

Last July, Eircom´s multimedia venture was allowed to launch. The launch was so profoundly ignorantly executed that some of the clueless digerati wannabes thought it was the launch of the hotel´s bar. The name of the venture is "rondomondo". This according to the promotional garbage is pigeon Spanish for "round the world". A glaring display of linguistic ignorance - the correct pigeon Spanish is "mondorondo". Unfortunately for the ignorati in Eircom, Mondorondo happens to be the name of a famous French web development company and they own the mondorondo.com domain name.

Last year, I suggested that Eircom was going to spin off its multimedia/internet section with the aim of having a major player like AOL taking it over. If AOL was to take over a newly floated Eircom Multimedia/Internet venture, the first thing to be eliminated would be rondomondo. The second would be that loss making dirge to intellectual poverty and bad taste, Local Ireland. Doras could be recovered but it would have to be completely rengineered. The brightest prospects would be for Muse and Cumasc - they would fit well in the AOL constellation.