A multi-millionaire Dutch businesswoman could have single-handedly spooked the European market for internet shares, it appeared yesterday.
Nina Brink, the 46-year-old founder of World Online, sold 1.2m shares in the company just a day after its €12bn flotation last week.
Her divestment has only just come to light because it was carried out in the name of an obscure US private equity house. However, the transaction has sent World Online's shares plummeting 40% below their debut price.
In any normal market, Mrs Brink's windfall would suggest, at worst, a slightly worrying lack of confidence in her company's future share performance. However, in these edgy days of internet hysteria, the transaction has fuelled fundamental concerns about "herd mentality" in dot.com valuations.
Technology shares had a bad day yesterday, falling 7% in London. That added to a desperate week, which has seen the likes of Lycos and Lastminute.com sink far below their ambitious flotation valuations. Lastminute ended the day down 35p at a low of 252p.
To analysts, the most worrying feature of the incident is that it suggests few investors read the World Online prospectus. The document clearly stated that Mrs Brink had siphoned off many of her shares to holding companies, which would not be covered by her six-month lock-in. However, everyone was deeply shocked when they realised she had sold.
Peter Bradshaw of Merrill Lynch says: "You certainly could not describe what's happened there as a net positive for the sector."
There is a growing feeling that European investors are taking too shallow a view of dot.com companies.
Sarah Skinner, of the hi-tech stockbroker Durlacher, says: "There's a big difference between investors in Europe and the US. In America, there's more actual interest in technology and in companies. In the UK and Europe, people just like the idea of getting rich quick rather than having any longer interest in the sector."
That has made European stocks even more volatile than US ones.
Ms Skinner believes it would be incorrect to suggest the dot.com bubble has burst, preferring to see the sell-off as "a pull-back to quality and a flight to reality".
The effect has been hastened by the arrival of more business-to-business e-commerce companies, which have a much faster route to profitability than the likes of lastminute.com and amazon.com, which are going after the consumer sales.
Sharon Coombs, an analyst at HSBC, says: "We're moving towards the more healthy view that not all of these companies are going to succeed. There's some questioning going on as to whether the new economy is really going to benefit over the next 20 years so much more than the rest of the market."
Internet service providers are feeling the pinch particularly badly - Freeserve fell 27p to 484p yesterday, its lowest point this year. There is a feeling that Europe is reaching a level of over-supply of these companies.
Among the others joining Lastminute.com were Scoot.com, which dropped 41p to £14.96 and QXL.com, which lost 57p to £10.60. The only consolation for lastminute's co-founder Martha Lane Fox is that another dot.com woman, Ms Brink, is feeling the heat.
