Eckhard Pfeiffer Quotations

I see Intershop as a leader in the E-commerce digital economy and believe the company has truly long-term potential.

Sometimes it's more difficult to achieve a 10% cost reduction than it is to tell people they have to achieve 50%. Small incremental steps block your view of doing something fundamentally different.

We've seen the power of the PC, and we've seen that it's unstoppable.

Today is either the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. Today we are making history.

We are reinventing ourselves as a company. Compaq is taking ownership of its customer relationships and accountability of our customer's needs.

I think the PC will continue to be around for a long, long time to come. We see a new range of products evolving around the PC, but it's not going away.

No one has ever been able to stop the process and evolution of technology, not even I.B.M. That is going to continue. Those who grab it and move ahead with it will determine the future in this industry.

I admit that the direct model has done a lot for Dell. That's the only thing the company has ever really accomplished.

I like the challenge of growing small companies into big global companies.

I turned Compaq from a small company with troubles into a computer powerhouse. We can do the same at Intershop.

The goal, as Compaq has stated all along in its history, is to support an open industry standard.

While market conditions will continue to be competitive, we fully intend to expand our business and grow market share profitably in 1999. The company will continue its aggressive drive of reduction of cost and operating expenses in the face of a very competitive market.

With these actions, we are attempting to achieve channel inventories that support ODM by the end of the second quarter. Our outlook for the second quarter is cautious as we continue to assess the North American commercial market environment.

Retire? I will never retire.

I am a very thorough person.

We looked closely at our market and business plan once it became clear that sales out of our North American commercial channels were not meeting our expectations. We are putting in place price reductions and aggressive promotions in the first and second quarter to reduce these channel inventories and accelerate the implementation of our Optimized Distribution Model.

These results reflect an excellent fourth quarter and outstanding year for Compaq . We're very pleased with the consistency of our financial progress, especially with the improvements in earnings and the growth of gross margins to 24.4 percent in the fourth quarter.

This is the holy grail for advertisers and consumers. It is an online marketplace of qualified leads.

Integrating all Compaq manufacturing operations into a single, cohesive organization is essential as we build the future Compaq.

The focus of this new organization is to fully leverage the Internet to not only sell systems and solutions, but also to build stronger relationships with our customers -- from personalized Web sites for consumers to highly integrated extranets for global corporations.