Definition of Bubble "Dotcom"
Miscellanea / / July 04, 2021
By Guillem Alsina González, in May. 2017
Everything that goes up, has to come down, and if we talk about economy Instead of physical, everything that swells, explodes at one point or another. And that was what happened at the beginning of this century with the technology companies in the so-called
The crisis or bubble of dot com, due to the overvaluation of technology companies for speculative purposes
The model of this crisis is not new and, in fact, we find historical precedents as far back as the 17th century Tulipomania in the Netherlands (which bankrupted the country's economy), the famous crack 29, or the most recent real estate crisis of 2008.
Speculation has always existed, with historically documented cases such as many of the practices that Crassus (one of the members of the First Triumvirate) conducted with his business in the Rome late republican.
The characteristic of the dot-com bubble is that the companies that starred in it offered services on the Internet, and the name of the crisis derives from the popular domain suffix .com
which was the one used in the domains of most of these companies.
The speculation was based on the simple premise of the future possibilities of these companies, when Internet master the most common operations.
This helped many speculators to buy securities of these companies and offer them for sale for a very high price. higher than their real price which, at the same time, were acquired by other investors who did the same, raising their price several magnitudes.
This led to a species of "chair game" that was played from approximately 1997 to 2001, the latter year in which the music It stopped ringing and the shares of most of the companies involved could not be sold for a price equal to or higher than that of their purchase, but instead went down. It is at this point that it is said that the bubble, which until then had been swelling, exploded
and this led not only to the decrease in capitalization of many companies, but also to a large number of closures and mergers
The companies with the worst foundations, those that had been founded and grew based on the premise of being sold as a mere instrument to get money and without a draft consistent behind them, they were the ones that closed, while the ones that were really based on a serious project but they had taken advantage of the moment, decreased in size or merged with others or were acquired.
There are those who say that the bubble served the interests of certain economic sectors to keep the best projects of that time and discard the others.
In the years from 2000 (peak of the bubble) to mid-2002 (once it had already exploded), the index of the NASDAQ (the American technology exchange, with its headquarters in New York) fell from 5,000 points to 1,300 approximately.
Humans do not learn from our mistakes as we should, and for some time now, many authoritative voices have affirmed that we are facing a new bubble
Although this time we are no longer talking about "dot com companies", but about "unicorns", companies that start in the market (start-ups) and that, due to its promising business model, its assessment exceeds 1,000 million dollars.
After all, they say that the extraordinary investment made in Facebook It will not be able to recover in more than a century, and that companies such as Uber or AirBnB have grown speculatively when they saw the legal problems they should face coming.
Furthermore, while these companies reign supreme in their respective segments, we already know that the field Technological has the peculiarity that a better positioned competitor can emerge from the minimum exchange.
Something that both the dot-com bubble and the current unicorn bubble have in common (which remains to be clarified if it is a bubble, although everything indicates that it is) is the abundance of capital risk.
Photos: Fotolia - anankkml / peshkov
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