I'm 57 years old. We knew it was over-hyped. It's easy to buy market value by using somebody else's money. But Belda eventually saw beyond the hype. The trick for Alcoa is that it is both a supplier and a customer, and it makes a wide variety of products from tiny metal fasteners to rocket engine components for the space program.
Fasteners are easy to sell over the Internet.
Rocket engines are not. While Alcoa may have been slow to adapt, this year it has made plenty of moves. It joined Quadrem, an Internet-based procurement exchange that includes copper, silver and other metal companies. What's more, Alcoa has partnered with Pittsburgh-based FreeMarkets and has installed Ariba software to provide plenty of B2B bidding options. Of course, a fair number of the Dow 30 were caught flat-footed by the Internet, especially some of the older industrials in commodities such as paper, metal and chemicals.