Shareholders of the Paris, France-based Linux distributor have also approved its acquisition of French services firm Edge-IT. Mandrake agreed to spend just under $520,000 on Edge-IT in July, but is hoping its move to the regulated Euronext Nouveau Marche will help it facilitate larger acquisitions and broaden equity ownership.
Mandrake’s shares have been traded on the unregulated Marche Libre since its initial public offering in 2001. It hopes to make the move to the Nouveau Marche by December 2005.
The capital share increase sees Mandrake issuing one million shares at a price of 6 euros ($7.30) per share to mostly existing shareholders to help the company increase its equity to the levels required for listing on the Nouveau Marche and improve the financial position of the firm following its recent spell under the French equivalent of bankruptcy protection.
Mandrake exited bankruptcy protection in March after achieving quarterly profitability for the first time since 1999 and has been performing better of late. For the third quarter ended June 2004, the company recorded net income of 190,000 euros ($231,742) on revenue of 1.5m euros ($1.8m), compared to a net loss of 370,000 euros ($451,289) on revenue of 1.1m euros ($1.3m) the previous year.
That growth has been helped by the recent release of version 10 of Mandrakelinux, which the company has now updated to 10.1, introducing new support for Intel Corp’s Centrino processors, Wi-Fi roaming, and BlueTooth devices, as well as new versions of the GCC compiler, the Kdevelop integrated development environment, and the GDB debugger.
Also in 10.1 are new versions of the KDE and Gnome desktops, the Mozilla browser and email suite, the OpenOffice.org productivity software, and the GIMP image manipulation software, as well as Mandrake’s own urpmi package management system.
The 10.1 technology enhancements are being released firstly in the Community edition of the product, which is aimed at users wanting the latest features. The Official edition of Mandrakelinux 10.1, for users wanting more stability, will follow in November.
