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| Business Words in the News
Friday 02 November 2001
Vocabulary from the business news. Listen to and read the report then find explanations of difficult words below.
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dot-com disaster
Summary: One of the founders of the failed internet company boo.com has published an account of why the company went out of business last year. After just a few months trading, they had spent a hundred million dollars put up by investors. This report from Mark Gregory.
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| | The News | |
| | | In its short life, boo.com was always in the spotlight. Its founders were two young Swedes - Kajsa Leander, a former model, and Ernst Malmsten. She was glamorous. He looked the archetypal computer nerd. They seemed the perfect combination for pioneering the retailing of high fashion and sports clothing over the internet, but neither had any experience of running a business.
High-profile investors poured in money. Large amounts were spent on lavish offices and media events, but there were long delays in getting boo.com's state of the art website to work, and consumers proved reluctant to buy expensive fashion goods online without trying them first. The company went bust, investors lost their money and boo passed into legend as the ultimate dot-com disaster.
Now, 18 months on, co-founder Ernst Malmsten has published his side of the story. It's an intriguing tale of financial mismanagement, technology failures and legal manoeuvrings. He owns up to making mistakes but says that it's only in retrospect that the venture seems misguided. Despite the legends of high living at investors' expense, the founders claim they only flew on Concorde three times and then on special offer.
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| | The Words
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| | | in the spotlight
getting a lot of publicity
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| | | the archetypal computer nerd
the typical image of someone who works with computers all the time
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| | | high-profile
very well-known
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| | | lavish
here, expensively decorated and furnished
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| | | state of the art
the best and most modern of something
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| | | reluctant
if you are reluctant to do something you don’t want to do it
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| | | went bust
lost its finance and became bankrupt
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| | | owns up to
if you own up to something, you admit your responsibility for it
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| | | in retrospect
looking back with the benefit of time having past
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