ebookers results defy Bezos warning

Pan-European online travel site ebookers has dodged the climate of e-tail gloom, despite Amazon boss Jeff Bezos warning small investors to avoid tech stocks.

ebookers announced strong sales growth and a relatively modest trading loss. Gross sales for the fourth quarter of 2000 were £30.1m, up from £6.7m for the same quarter last year, with losses of only three pence per share for Q4. The BBC announced today that Jeff Bezos had warned small investors against holding amazon.com stock. In an interview for a special report entitled The Great Dot Con on BBC 2's Money Programme, Bezos said: "We are not a stock you can sleep well with at night. We're a volatile stock." Unlike many dot-coms, ebookers offers investors the added security of large cash reserves to tide it over on the long haul to profitability. In July ebookers raised $45m in private equity, and cash reserves stood at $50m by the end of 2000. Nonetheless, investors are still lukewarm about holding shares in ebookers. On Friday the company was trading at just $3.50 on the Nasdaq, valuing the entire company at $79.3m - only $29.3m above the value of ebooker's cash reserves.