GIVATAYIM, Israel — If stars are created in fire, then one Israeli company succeeded in emblazoning its fame with a fiery first-year stock performance.
GEO Interactive Media Group, a high-tech start-up based in Givatayim, closed 1997 with a 211 percent growth in its stock price, making it last year’s sixth best-performing share on London’s exchanges.
GEO develops and markets its own line of Internet products called Emblaze. Using compression techniques that GEO’s founders developed while in the army, Emblaze allows Web site designers to create sites with audio, video and interactive media features which can be sent via modem quickly and without the use of plug-ins or special server applications.
The stock hike is even more amazing considering GEO only began selling Emblaze last October.
When GEO went public in October 1996, it promised investors two products by April with annual sales of $6 million. The Internet company was set to launch Emblaze on schedule, but chose to hold off at the advice of marketing consultants, who recommended first seeding the market for its arrival. GEO created print and online advertising, full direct mail, a catalog, plus a full slate of free seminars — which are overbooked with more than 21,000 registrants.
In October, GEO came out with not two products, but six. Analysts expected fourth-quarter sales to be in the region of $1 million. Net sales exceeded that in the first four weeks after going to market.
Investors paid close attention, and 90 percent of GEO’s 1997 stock increase came in the last two months of the year.
GEO’s early success in the United States is due in part to the expertise of the high-end consulting firm Cambrix Publishing Inc., a powerful connection in the computer-marketing industry. Success is also due in part to the establishment of its own marketing and publishing house, U.S.-based subsidiary GEO Publishing Inc.
“It’s unparalleled, unmatched,” said Eli Reifman, executive vice president of marketing and sales, and one of GEO’s four founders.
So far, GEO has no competitors. Reifman believes GEO has about a year head-start on any future competition. Customers include big names such as Disney, Intel, McDonald’s Corp., Arthur Andersen Consulting, Lucient and MTV.
Started by four friends out of a Tel Aviv apartment in 1994, GEO today counts 145 employees, 100 of them in Israel, with its headquarters sprawled over three floors.