Mary Meeker: Net bubble will burst in early 2000

Net sage Mary Meeker has warned that the online bubble will burst for many Web companies in the New Year. The Morgan Stanley Dean Witter top analyst believes that a whopping 90 per cent of listed Internet companies are overvalued. "I think there will be an ecommerce shake-out in the first quarter of 2000," she told financial journal Barron. Seen as the leading analyst on the cyber industry, she also voiced concerns over start-up companies spending too much cash on advertising to make a splash in the sector. Meeker, who is set to reap $15 million from the Internet revolution this year, said: "Customer acquisition costs for a lot of companies have gone through the roof. "I worry - I lived through the early days of the PC business in the early 1980s, when every PC business was going to the moon." However, Amazon, Yahoo and AOL were not among those companies causing Ms Meeker’s worry lines. "There’s a good chance that the capital markets will remain robust, in large part because there are a lot of new market opportunities for new Internet players that are truly changing the way business it done," she said. ®