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Boo
Hoo It's Dot
Gone!
Three hundred staff of collapsed e-commerce trader Boo.com are to lose their jobs. Two hundred British employees of Boo are among them, inspite of 30 offers to take over the business; the first major e-commerce collapse in Europe. In what is described as an 'anarchic' meeting on Thursday, Boo managers and the company's liquidators KPMG told Boo's employees that they will receive only £800 in redundancy payments. Boo fell apart after failing to secure £20 million in addition to the £80 million provided by investors last year. Boo's collapse ends its ambition to be the "first truly online retailer of sportswear and fashion". Experts say that it's bound to affect the confidence of investors, and even on-line shoppers. Media organisations such as the BBC and the ITN said that the "bubble had now burst" in the fledgling industry. A series of on-line dot-com enterprises were launched to fanfares of hype at the beginning of the year. On-line travel agent, lastminute.com, saw its share price halve within days of placing the company on the stock market. The Government itself, and the European Union, is fully behind the industry - although e-commerce provisions for farmers are lacking. Prime Minister Tony Blair appointed an e-Envoy, Alex Allan, to preach the industry's economic and commercial benefits. The e-Envoy's own Web site states: "The Prime Minister is committed to making the UK the best place in the world for e-commerce, and my job is to co-ordinate the Government's drive towards this goal." Industry analysts, however, believe that there's still a lot to learn - particularly after Boo.com's sudden crash out of business - about how e-commerce should be best practised. The company's founders themselves face a lot of criticism, and accusations of mismanagement. It's said that Boo.com
founders Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten did not fully
understand the technology. The design of the company's
Web site was critical to its success. The site has faced
a barrage of criticisms for being painfully slow and only
accessible to on-line shoppers with 56 kilobits per
second modems and above. As a result the company failed
to attract the revenue it needed to survive, and
accumulating a £17 million debt in the process. However,
reports today suggest that Boo.com could be presented
with happier days.... |
More Trouble to come..
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