Acquiring the net liabilities of privately-held DiviCom Inc for $143m last month may have cast C-Cube Microsystems Inc figures into the red, but it means the Milpitas, California digital video specialist MPEG chip company now has not only the MPEG chips but the systems from DiviCom that uses them (CI No 2,990). The purchase required a $131.3m hit to be taken by C-Cube in its third quarter figures, resulting in net losses of $117.8m, against profits last time of $8.4m, as revenues shot up 136% to $83.2m. That included a month of DiviCom contributions, but C-Cube was not splitting out the figures last week. The $65.7m in cash and shares that C-Cube paid gave it DiviCom net liabilities of $1.9m, $14.2m of purchased technology that C-Cube will amortize over five years and the $131.1m of written-off in-process technology. DiviCom already used C-Cube’s chips in its digital video systems, and introduced its MediaView MV25 Program Encoder during the quarter, based on C-Cube’s CLM4740 compression chipset, which the company claims is the only encoder to integrate a pre-processor with an advanced video compressor within the same unit. C-Cube is due to launch its next generation chipsets, in November, this time using Sun Microsyetsms Inc’s Sparc RISC technology, having given up on its proprietary RISCs (CI No 2,888). During the quarter C-Cube won Sony Corp’s signature for its CL9100 MPEG 2 set-top decoder chip for Sony’s digital set-top boxes that are being used in Japan’s PerfecTV program. Net losses for the three-quarters were $90.3m against profits for the same time last year of $15.8m, as revenues rose 203% to $224.2m. Cash and equivalents were still at $54.5m at the end of the third quarter. The markets were not too impressed though, nudging the shares down $1.125 to $45.75 the day after, as the figures came out after the market closed Thursday.
