 |
Transcript
Boston Business Journal
(WBIX 1060 AM)
Jan 10, 2001
Dave
Anthony, anchor: And now we go to Burlington to
focus on a company called Ibasis. This is a firm that
deals with telephone on the Internet, to a degree.
Ofer Gneezy is the firm's president and CEO and he
joins us on the program. Good morning, sir.
Ofer Gneezy (President and Chief Executive Officer,
Ibasis): Good morning, Dave.
Anthony: How are you?
Gneezy: I'm doing great.
Anthony: Thank you for joining us. It's a
pleasure to have you on the program. iBasis is a company
that deals in routing, I suppose, telephone calls
through the Internet. Am I on the right track there?
Gneezy: Yes, absolutely. Though, you know,
just to distinguish from the dire news that you had
at the beginning of the report here, we--as of last
quarter, we had three hundred and forty million dollars
fully funded to profitability, so quite different
business than the dot-coms that you described. What
we do is we take international calls between the country
of origin and the destination country and we transmit
those calls over the Internet. Our customers are the
large phone companies.
And as you make international calls the phone companies,
for some particular types of calls, or some particular
destination, choose to transmit those calls to our
network and we have all the equipment that converts
those calls to Internet packages like small e-mail
packets. We have a network that is now covering forty-four
countries and we take those international calls for
the carriers.
Anthony: Is this the way of the future, do
you think? Obviously, you're in this business and
you've grown doing it. Is it cheaper to do it this
way?
Gneezy: It is, I believe, the way of the future
for two reasons: one, it's more cost-effective, so
it's cheaper to do it this way. And the second reason
is that this type of transmittal of voice over the
Internet also enables new and enhanced services that
are not possible on the old legacy circuit-switching
network.
Anthony: And what kinds of things can happen now
that weren't available before?
Gneezy: Some of it--an example, maybe I'll give
you some applications that are done by PriceInteractive,
who's a company that we've recently announced that
we acquired. So, for example, if you think about you
having a 401(k) and you can modify their locations
and check on your investments using a computerized
Web connection. What we enable is for you to then
call on the regular phone into the Web site and talk
to the Web site.
Anthony: So, you can surf the Web using your
voice.
Gneezy: Right. You can surf the Web using
your voice and you can get access to all Internet
content and Internet e-commerce using regular voice
from any phone.
Anthony: So, speech-recognition software is
key to some of this, isn't that correct?
Gneezy: It is, absolutely. Speech recognition,
a lot of speech-user interface, application development,
text-to-speech capability and, all this, as we see
the network of the future will have Internet telephony
gateways like the ones we have throughout the world
that allows (sic) the users to connect on the local
call and then our equipment converts it to Internet
packets, so it's very cost-effective to send those
packets to the servers that there will (sic) the voice
recognition and they interconnect into the information
source.
Anthony: Technology is sort of taking a beating
on Wall Street. Your own stock, of course, much lower
than it was maybe at this point a year ago. Is that
a disconcerting thing to you to watch what's happened
in general to the industry?
Gneezy: Well, obviously, it's not fun to watch
the stock market today. You know, when we went public
and did our secondary offering, of course the markets
were much stronger and we--since we are both in a
communication service-provider space and Internet
infrastructure, we were able to raise the money at
very favorable conditions. Today, of course, both
of those areas are under pressure: both telecommunications--if
I look at AT&T, WorldCom and Sprint, both--all
three of them down sixty to seventy percent for the
year.
Anthony: Right.
Gneezy: And then the Internet space, of course--I
think that if you compare us to Yahoo!, we're down
about the same percentage for the year. And, likewise,
all of the Internet telephony companies, like our
direct competitor ITXC (sp). So, for us, we did raise
enough money to see us through to profitability, so
it's allowing us to continue to execute our plan and
our aggressive growth, in the last quarter, in the
third quarter when announced the results (sic) were
a hundred ninety-seven percent over the same quarter
a year before. So, we continued with very fast growth.
We--it was announced various efficiency plans that
we're putting in place to accelerate our cross-over
to profitability. So we were quite confident that
we can continue to grow the business and the stock
market would eventually regain its feet, we believe.
Anthony: Yeah. Just as long as you can wait
it out and turn things into a positive situation for
you, certainly. And you're in an area that has a lot
of growth potential, despite the down-turn on the
market. The Internet is not going away anytime soon.
Gneezy: No.
Anthony: Ofer Gneezy is the president and CEO
for iBasis Company, based in Burlington. If you want
to find out more, you can go to the company's Web
site, ibasis.net. Mr. Gneezy, it was a pleasure to
have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.
Gneezy: Thank you very much, Dave.
|
|
