Shares in Tadpole Technology Plc dipped below the 65 pence flotation price for the first time on Wednesday, and kept right on falling when the market opened yesterday, off another 15 pence at 40 pence, but anyone that has lost money on the shares has little genuiune grounds for complaint – as we highlighted ahead of the flotation, the prospectus put clearly into sharp relief the woeful trading record of the Cambridge company and no-one needed to be a rocket scientist to spot how few and far between had been the profitable, so that the sha res were very fully priced at 65 pence; despite that they have been as high as 356 pence on brokers’ hype and hot air this year, and an active trader doing quick ins and outs could have made a lot of money on the shares; in some ways it is a good thing that the company is so out of favour and will be seen as a dog for the next 18 months, because it can expect to be left alone to get on with getting the business back on track without being distracted by the thrills and spills and alarms and excursions of the stock market; it does however raise the question whether firms as small and in such a volatile business as Tadpole would not be very much better off remaining private until they are very much bigger and can show a consistent trading record.
IBM Corp is expected to take a one-time net charge of $900m against its figures for the quarter in which it completes the Lotus Development Corp acquisition, and to write off an additional $1,700m over five years to account for the balance of goodwill in the whopping price it is paying, the Wall Street Journal reckons: that means that the company should still show a profit in the quarter it takes the initial hit; the initial $900m is the maximum allowable under accounting rules; and the rest is expected to cost it $90 a quarter over the remaining five-year term.
Alcatel SEL AG, German subsidiary of Alcatel NV, warned the annual meeting that sales may decline by up to 10% this year as a result of falling prices, and it will likely make a loss of up to $70m on it.
AT&T Corp’s data transmission business wants software partners in multimedia services, but takeovers like IBM Corp’s dauntingly costly buy of Lotus Development Corp are not in its compass, the company told Reuters: Clearly we have to be looking in the multimedia services area, said Jim Cosgrove, general manager of the $4,000m to $5,000m a year business and multimedia services group – I think the alliance strategy has worked very well for us; we don’t see ourselves going on an acquisition strategy; he says he is quite happy with IBM owning Lotus because the industry is working towards open systems.
Cable & Wireless Plc is not commenting on Israeli market gossip that it was the mystery buyer of a large tranche of Bezeq Israel Telecommunication Corp Ltd shares in a sale that lifted the share price 10%; Cable & Wireless bought a 7.01% stake in Bezeq on May 1 and said at the time it was looking to increase its holding, Reuters notes; the UK firm wants to form a strategic alliance with Bezeq but is not seeking a majority stake in the Israeli telephone monopoly, which is due to be privatised later this year.
We ran out of time and space for this one yesterday, but the flurry of excitement over sale or non-sale of any of China International Trust & Investment Corp’s shares in Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd ended up in a real damp squib after having reached fever pitch when the CITIC Pacific Ltd arm of the Trust was announced to have sold 67m shares shortly after it issued a denial that it was a seller of any of its 12%; the seller turned out to be another arm of China Trust, CITIC Hong Kong Ltd, which has a separate balance sheet and separate investment agenda, but holds 42.83% of CITIC Pacific, and wanted some cash for its other businesses; talk that AT&T Corp may have been the buyer does not seem to signify, because the buy is hardly a springboard for aggressive action – we calculate that they represent a stake of roughly 0.5% in Hong Kong
Telecom, or 1.18% of free shares not held by Cable & Wireless Plc.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB has won a $36m turnkey contract with Intel-Panama SA, the national telecommunications operator of Panama: the deal calls for it to design, plan and implement the expansion of the public phone network in Panama and includes AXE equipment, transmission and power equipment, equipment for supplying ISDN services and the postprocessing of billing data; total project implementation and manufacturing will be assumed by Ericsson in Mexico, the Swede said.
Belgian telecommunications group Telinfo SA has joined France Telecom Mobile International in its bid for Belgium’s second cellular net.
Unisys Corp has a contract worth about $188m from the General Services Administration’s Federal Computer Acquisition Center on behalf of the US Coast Guard for hardware, software, installation maintenance, training, documentation, forms conversion and support services for the migration from the current proprietary environment to an open systems environment; the contract runs from June 12 to September 30, and may be extended annually, but it is must not exceed five years.
Longtime users of the Internet are bemoaning the fact that most of the once-useful newsgroups are now largely filled with pap, silly questions and unreliable information as frivolous people flock to join the latest craze – but while they are having a hard time now, they can take heart by remembering crazes like skateboarding, Citizens Band Radio, hoola hoops, yo-yos and The Twist, recalling how big they were and how quickly they vanished as if they had never been, banished to the back of the toy cupboard or to quaint old movie clips: in a year or two’s time, all the popular press and television coverage of the Internet will have been swept away by the latest fad, and although the thing will be much bigger and more widely used, it will be nothing but another boring old business tool – so anyone planning to invest in an Internet-related company for anything more than a quick in and out better make sure the firm’s products are genuinely innovative and useful for business.
Geac Computer Corp Ltd, Markham, Ontario reports that its Geac Computers Inc is to sell its retail and restaurant software with IBM Corp’s point-of-sale restaurant systems.
Compaq Computer Corp added two desktops using Intel Corp’s new 120MHz version of the Pentium: the Deskpro XL 5120 costs from $3,950.
The underlying market is growing faster here in Europe than the underlying market in the US, 3Com Corp executive vice-president Robert Finocchio told Reuters at a conference in Brussels: the company does not break the figures out but 3Com sales in Europe have traditionally accounted for about 40% of its world total – in the first nine months of its current financial year, it did $76.4m on sales of $892.7m; 3Com reckons it is now the largest networking firm in Europe.
Platinum Technology Inc acquisition target Trinzic Corp (most of its takeovers are not actually completed yet) will ship version 2.0 of its ObjectPro application development tool in the third quarter for Windows NT, with AIX and HP-UX versions due by year-end; the new release 0 includes new code generation features, navigation tools, a new interface and additional re-use capabilities, and is from $3,000.
Campbell, California-based Black & White Software Inc has acquired Rogue Wave Software Inc’s RWCGEN code generator which links UIM/X, the graphical user interface builder from Canadian software house Visual Edge Software Ltd, with Rogue Wave’s View .h++ C++ library; up under Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX and Irix Unixes, RWCGEN goes for $700; UIM/X is available from Black & White, and RWCGEN and View h++ can be had from either software house.
The guy don’t know he’s born – the Financial Times quotes a Dataquest Inc analyst saying memory chip prices are exorbitant – personal computer users can expect to pay $250 for a 4Mb memory upgrade (and that price is high for th
e streetwise): pity the poor IBM Corp 9021 water-cooled mainframe user – his admittedly rather better class memory with more error correction and such lists for $1,920 per Megabyte or $7,680 for that 4Mb upgrade, although if IBM is feeling generous he might get it for $6,800 – but wait a minute, we’re not finished yet, on top of that there’s $6.52 per Megabyte per month maintenance.
