uBid presented a picture of its online-auction business on Tuesday at the ThinkEquity Annual Growth Conference in San Francisco. uBid President and CEO Robert H. Tomlinson, Jr., detailed uBid's history and financial performance and outlined uBid's recent strategies.

uBid has direct relationships with 3,700 OEMs and has 1500 direct merchants in its UCM certified merchant program. It has a user base of 5.5 million going back to 1997.

Tomlinson said uBid's business model is a hybrid of its direct program, which achieves greater margins, and the certified merchant program, which gives it tremendous growth in uBid's GAAP margins. He said uBid will maintain a small percentage of its business in the direct program.

Tomlinson said the company had recently acquired assets of C2C site Bidville.com, and said, "We will continue to do M&A work aggressively in the space along with a new company called Trading Group, which is a B2B arm, which we expanded just recently." (More on the Bidville acquisition here: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m07/i27/s00.) uBid gained 900,000 customers through the Bidville acquisition.

Tomlinson said there are substantial growth opportunities, particularly in the M&A side as uBid grows out its categories. He said uBid will build out its verticals deeply, and mentioned opportunities in new categories such as automotive and apparel.

He said the only shortcoming uBid currently has is on the demand side, and pointed to organic search and listings, which would fuel growth. He also outlined ROI-driven marketing initiatives. A presentation slide outlined online and offline acquisition initiatives and expanded CRM efforts, including affiliate programs and comparison-shopping inclusion campaigns as well as television and radio ads that drive brand awareness for uBid with its theme of "save big, save safe."

The presentation was webcast and is available through a link on uBid's website.

http://www.wsw.com/webcast/tep10/ubhi.ob