(March 28) – “On a sultry Sunday evening earlier this month, Taiwanese death-metal rock music echoed from a party in a hillside apartment far above the ribbon of headlights snaking through the skyscrapers below. The living room was emptied of all but a couch, a table and a couple of pairs of socks balled up in the corner. Over the din, a dozen young Internet entrepreneurs swapped business plans and financing tips, gushing over the millions they hoped to make when their companies went public,” wrote Laura Holson in The Sunday New York Times.
“Such soirees were unheard of a year ago, as was Matei Mihalca, an Internet analyst from Merrill Lynch who was the host of these festivities. His unbridled enthusiasm, and his embrace of the Net culture, have quickly made him a favorite among Asia’s new cyber jet set. That and the fact that he can help make them all very, very rich.
“‘Ehr-fei! You have to meet these guys!’ Mr. Mihalca shouted across the room, charging toward Ehr-fei Liu, a Merrill technology banker, two Web design executives in tow. ‘They already beat their revenue forecasts for the year. This is a real growth story! Huge. I mean huge! This company is all about opportunity!’ Then the cell phone in his pocket rang, and Mr. Mihalca walked away, lost in the next big opportunity, leaving the three men behind to exchange awkward hellos.
Asia is sick with dot-com fever. But no one has the bug so badly as American investment banks hoping to take Asia’s new Internet companies public. Asian economies, left for dead two years ago when the tumbling dominoes of a currency crisis brought the region’s growth to an abrupt halt, are being reinvented overnight. Or, at least, Asia’s stock markets are. As many as 50 Internet concerns in countries like China, India and Singapore are likely to go public this year alone, more than double the number that did so last year. Fueling that boom is the rising number of people in Asia going online, projected to more than triple over the next four years.