An enterprising Spanish MBA student and a husband and wife team in New Jersey, US, could stand to benefit more than most investors after Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham last week confirmed that they have re-opened merger talks, two years after their first attempt collapsed.

The talks, which were first revealed by Financial News last week, are expected to lead to a formal merger announcement this week, in a deal which will create the biggest company in the UK with a market cap of £113.7bn (E181bn) at last week's close. The natural name for the new company would be GlaxoSmithKline. But unfortunately for Glaxo, the website address www.glaxosmithkline.com was snapped up in October last year by David Uriate, an MBA student at the International School of Management at the University of Navarra in Spain. Uriate, who was unaware when contacted by Financial News that talks between the two firms had re-opened, said he had registered the address because he liked the name, not because he wanted to cash in on a potential merger. www.glaxosb.com was registered in Korea in November. If the two companies decide to give Jan Leschly, the outgoing head of SmithKline, a retirement present and name the new firm SmithKlineGlaxo, they will find that domain taken too. Melissa Kearstan, who works at Warner Lambert in New Jersey in the US, registered www.smithklineglaxo.com as a birthday present for her husband Kenneth in November last year. She bought herself www.pfizerlambert.com, which could be worth significantly more than the $70 she paid for it if the hostile bid by Pfizer for Warner-Lambert goes through. The two companies already own www.glaxosmithkline.co.uk, which was registered the day they opened talks back in February 1998. AOL took no such chances with website addresses before its announced its merger with Time Warner last monday. The day before it registered 21 different domain names combining the two firms.