When the US tech stock index Nasdaq, soared to a dizzy height of
5,048.62 on 10 March, 2000, champagne glasses clinked and investors patted themselves on the backs. This market value was more than double its worth just 14 months ago.But the celebration was short-lived. Stock prices on Nasdaq reached their peak that day, marking the start of the end for the dot-com era.
Today, five years after the crash, has the word dot-com become fashionable once again?
During the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, billions of dollars in venture funding were thrown at any entrepreneur, with little or no market experience, who had a business idea to sell. The bustling investment drive pushed the stock valuations of Internet companies through the roof, until the bubble finally burst in March 2000.
It was only in 1999 that dot-coms started blossoming in the Asia-Pacific region. Research firm Gartner forecasted that the worldwide B2C e-commerce market would generate $31.2bn (£18.2) in revenue that year, almost three times that of 1998.
After the crippling 1997 Asian economic crisis companies in the region searched for a new avenue that would bring in revenues at the lowest cost. The dot-com bubble offered that hope and companies rushed to "e-enable" everything adding a suffix ".com" to their corporate names.
As stories of successful young entrepreneurs making millions of dollars from the Internet filtered out of Silicon Valley, it was not surprising that companies in the region subsequently jumped onto the bandwagon as well.
In June 1999, China.com (now Chinadot-com), a Hong Kong-based portal which had touted itself as a "pan-Asian Internet company delivering content, community and commerce", launched its initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq, making it one of the first companies in the Asia-Pacific region to do so. Tom.com, Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-Shing's Internet venture, followed suit a year later in March 2000 and its share value surged five-fold by the end of its first trading day.
Steve Bittinger, research director at Gartner, looked back on the frenzy. "Allan Greenspan used the term 'irrational exuberance' to describe the dot-com era, suggesting that the high expectations and high valuations of dot-com companies significantly exceeded their real value," he said.
"Many investors and business leaders did not have a sound grasp on the changing business fundamentals that [would] apply in a world where so many...
