The work-in-progress that is Zapata Corp, added another building block last week when the company announced that its ZAP Corp. subsidiary has agreed to acquire Florida-based Attitude Network, an on-line gaming magazine, for an undisclosed amount in stock.
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Zapata, the Houston-based fish meal company, has made a name simply by declaring itself an Internet concern, making an unsolicited–and unappreciated–bid to buy Excite Inc. and loudly disclosing intentions to acquire 31 Web sites and electronic commerce businesses.
With Attitude Network and its Happy Puppy and Games Domain sites, Zapata also is trumpeting an acquisition of another kind, an Internet management team. Zapata President and CEO Avram A. Glazer says Attitude’s David Rae will play an as-yet-undetermined role in running ZAP, the Internet company Glazer eventually plans to split from Zapata.
“The plan was to bring in a management team from one of our acquisitions,” says Glazer. “We’ve been waiting for the right opportunity, and this is it.”
The company has said it would separate ZAP, whose revenues would be something north of $20 million, Glazer says, if Zapata owned all the sites it’s negotiating to buy.
Glazer deserves to be taken seriously if for no other reasons than because he has more than $100 million in cash at his disposal and because he’s playing directly to Wall Street’s appetite for anything associated with the Internet, the recent selloff notwithstanding.
In other words, why knock the smart aleck who puts dog food on posh plates when investors are barking up a storm for dog food?
“Our stock is very different from the other Internet stocks out there,” he says, noting that Zapata’s fish meal and sausage casings holdings alone–otherwise known as Omega Protein Corp. and Envirodyne Industries Inc.–are together worth more than $17 a share, meaning Wall Street values the Internet properties at zero.