October 30, 2000

PARTMINER RECEIVES $37.5 MILLION FROM CAHNERS, IHS GROUP AND ONEX CORPORATION Backers Re-Invest in B2B Electronic Components Marketplace and Services Provider New York, October 30, 2000 – PartMiner�, Inc., a provider of business-to-business procurement services to the global electronic components industry, today closed a round of private financing, raising $37.5 million in equity from current investors Cahners Business Information, IHS Group and Onex Corporation. To date, PartMiner has raised $115 million in private equity. PartMiner will use the funds raised to further the growth of the company and its online marketplace, the Free Trade Zone™, which allows users to research, source and purchase electronic components online. In addition, PartMiner will use a portion of the funds to support its Excess Trade Zone™, a full-service excess components inventory management and asset recovery offering, which debuted this September. “We tracked PartMiner for the last year as a leader in the electronic components marketplace, and their performance confirmed our earlier decision to invest in PartMiner and we are pleased to further back them with financial resources,” said Brian Nairn, president and COO of publishing giant Cahners Business Information. “PartMiner has the right revenue model and partnerships to automate and add value to the electronic components supply chain.” Cahners has invested on three separate occasions in PartMiner, and the company has made the Free Trade Zone the exclusive e-commerce provider on e-inSITE, Cahners’ portal for the electronic original equipment manufacturer market. IHS Group, another three-time PartMiner investor, sold CAPSXpert, the world’s largest database of component information, and its component supplier management (CSM) software to PartMiner in November 1999. Onex Corporation, the Canadian investment firm which holds a significant interest in Celestica, Inc., the world’s third largest provider of electronics manufacturing services, is a two-time investor in PartMiner. "The consistent support of our investors is a strong endorsement of our market vision and performance to date," said Dan Nissanoff, CEO of PartMiner. "With their backing, we'll continue to build out our suite of procurement services to support manufacturers' supply chains from product inception to production. The Excess Trade Zone is the next step towards end-to-end supply chain management." About PartMiner PartMiner, Inc. provides marketplace technology and procurement services to the global electronic components industry. The company’s online marketplace, the Electronic Commerce Free Trade Zone™, located at www.freetradezone.com, allows buyers and sellers to communicate and interact more effectively. Currently, thousands of users have registered to research and source electronic components online with PartMiner’s existing procurement software. The company’s investors include Agile Software, Boston Ventures, Broadview Capital Partners, Cahners Business Information, Generation Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs, IHS Group, Impact Ventures Partners, Integral Capital Partners, Onex Corporation, Seacoast Capital and Vulcan Securities Limited. PartMiner is headquartered in New York City at 432 Park Avenue South, 12 Floor, with offices in Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East. Additional information about PartMiner and the company’s excess service, the Excess Trade Zone, are available at www.partminer.com and www.excesstradezone.com. PartMiner is a registered trademark of PartMiner, Inc. Electronic Commerce Free Trade Zone, and Free Trade Zone are trademarks of PartMiner, Inc. There is a patent pending on the Electronic Commerce Free Trade Zone. Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in news releases are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements.