CNET ducks a question on its conf call (1Q05 conf call quotes)

CNET Networks (ticker: CNET) CEO Shelby Bonnie took questions from analysts on the company's Q1 financial results conference call. Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy has been bullish on CNET's stock, ranking it as one of his top picks in the Internet sector. He asked two questions:

1. What was CNET's organic growth rate (ie. revenue growth excluding
   acquisitions) during the quarter? and
2. When did CNET expect to grow revenues at the 30% plus rates that we've seen from Yahoo and others? ("I would expect you can catch up with those rates", he encouragingly added).

CNET's total revenue growth in Q1 was 18%, and its interactive revenues grew 23%. With that background, here's the answer Mr Raschtchy received from Shelby Bonnie:

I think starting your second question, if you look at guidance that we're providing not only for second quarter and for the full year of '05, you'll see guidance growth rates in the second quarter of between 27 and 32% on the interactive side and for the full year between 23 and 26… I think the numbers that we're seeing for the rest of the year I think look quite attractive.

And when you actually look at the first-quarter numbers, I think - a little bit to the first part of your question - one of the things that's happened is [that] as we've added more international inventory and more consumer inventory over the past year, you have seen our business get slightly more seasonal. As you know, especially with Chinese properties and the Chinese New Year, you see a lot of seasonality in the first quarter. And so I think from our perspective as the slight -- the mix has slightly shifted among our properties. I think it's more important to look out at the full year and I think we remain very encouraged and very happy with what we're seeing in terms of overall growth rates.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)

Quick comment: Given that a company's organic revenue growth rate is such a basic and fundamental statistic for investors, it's remarkable that CNET's CEO wanted to avoid providing it. How can one evaluate a business if you don't know its revenue growth rate excluding acquisitions? Why would Shelby Bonnie want to avoid that question - unless the organic growth rate in Q1 was so far from the company's 25-30% target growth rate that investors would question the company's projections?

CNET chart below.

Full disclosure: at the time of writing I'm short CNET.