The tag of the next hot initial public offering has gone to Yahoo! Corp, Sunnyvale, which filed a couple of weeks ago (CI No 2,870), but why should anyone want to buy into a company whose shares will no doubt soar as soon as trading begins? Well, under Risk Factors, the prospectus lists 27 reasons why you shouldn’t such as that Yahoo! has an extremely limited operating history, a new management team, relies on non-exclusive deals with its search engine provider and its distributors, not to mention the uncertainty over the adoption of the Web as an advertising medium. The company also says many of its existing competitors, including America Online Inc’s Web Crawler and Digital Equipment Corp’s Alta Vista searcher have significantly greater financial, technical and marketing resources than Yahoo!
