Many IT pros watched their budgets get trimmed in 2009, but security was the one area that proved relatively resilient. That was good news for security companies, who did not sit still during the year. In the last 12 months, there were a number of acquisitions in the security space that gobbled up companies big and small. In a look back at the year soon be in the history books, eWEEK lists the corporate acquisitions that caused the biggest ripples in the IT security industry.
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Singapore REITs are expected to pursue more acquisitions in 2010 to drive growth, with deals likely to be funded by private placements, says OCBC Investment Research.
“Opportunistic acquisitions will be very much in vogue in 2010 as some REITs shore up declining earnings and others exploit favourable market conditions,” it says in a research note although funding sources may be limited as REIT managers unlikely to increase their aggregate gearing level to make new purchases.
OCBC adds that raising equity through rights issues may also be challenging as REIT sponsors, institutional investors are already over-leveraged. Steep discounts to ensure successful rights issues may also obstruct earnings-accretive acquisitions.
“As a result, private placements are likely the most promising source of funds in 2010 in our view.”
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Asia Pacific Breweries will pay $484.4 million for Heineken NV’s stakes in PT Multi Bintang Indonesia and Grande Brasserie de Nouvelle Caledonie SA.
It will receive $51.9 million from the sale of its Indian brewery operations, the company said in a statement to the Singapore stock exchange.
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Google reports third-quarter profit of $1.64 billion, a 27 percent boost from its profit of $1.29 billion in the third quarter of 2008. Google CEO Eric Schmidt stresses that Google will make acquisitions, large and small, and says the search engine hopes to get a test version of its Chrome Operating System out to developers later in 2009. Schmidt further claims Chrome OS is faster and more efficient than incumbent operating systems, including other Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows.
– Kicking sand in the face of the recession, on Oct. 15 Google reported third-quarter profit of $1.64 billion on
earnings per share of $5.13, a 27 percent boost from its profit of $1.29
billion on EPS of $4.06 in the year-ago period.
Google posted third-quarter revenues of $5.94 billion, 7 percent …
A new merger wave may be forming, with lots of companies’ shares still at relatively cheap prices
THERE is nothing like a good bidding war to lift capitalism’s spirits. And that may be exactly what is about to happen after Kraft made a $17 billion bid for Cadbury on September 7th. The venerable British confectioner rejected out of hand the American food giant’s offer, saying it “fundamentally undervalues” the company, which could continue to thrive on its own. Kraft’s management said it would be disciplined, but intended to pursue a hostile bid. This triggered speculation that other big food companies, such as Nestle, Hershey and Mars, might enter the fray, perhaps as a “white knight” that would help Cadbury maintain its independence—or, at least, give it up on more advantageous terms.
Kraft’s move is one of several in recent days that have raised hopes of a new wave of mergers and acquisitions just as it seemed, after a summer of inactivity, that 2009 would be a moribund year for M&A. On September 8th Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom said they would merge their British mobile-phone operations, respectively T-Mobile and Orange, to create a new market leader. The same day Vivendi of France said it was buying GVT, a Brazilian mobile-phone firm, for €2 billion ($2.9 billion). On August 31st Disney bought superhero factory Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion, and Baker Hughes offered $5.5 billion for its fellow Houston-based energy-services firm, BJ Services. The next day eBay sold a 65% stake in its internet-phone unit, Skype, for $1.9 billion, to a group of private-equity investors. …
Given the economy, maybe it is not surprising that there are security acquisitions going on, as it perhaps gives larger vendors an opportunity to buy smaller ones at somewhat cheaper price than in the best of times.
The past few months have seen several acquisitions in the security space: IBM’s purchase of Ounce Labs, Trend Micro’s soon-to-be-closed acquisition of Third Brigade and McAfee’s plans for MX Logic, just to name a few.
With this in mind, eWEEK has compiled a list of security acquisitions we would like to see. This list was written without regard to any acquisition rumors that may be floating around about any of these companies, but with an eye toward the product portfolios of various vendors and their competitors.
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IBM, which already had partnered with SPSS, is taking a significant step into the burgeoning predictive analytics space with the proposed purchase of the company. There has been a race on by the likes of IBM, Oracle, SAP and SAS to build up their data analytics capabilities both through acquisitions and in-house development and IBM buying SPSS would put it in the forefront of the increasingly competitive space, according to analysts.
– IBMs proposed $1.2 billion acquisition
of SPSS is the most significant piece in the puzzle at least since the
Cognos purchase in 2007 in the vendors push to give customers the tools they
need to not only collect data but also to use it to their business advantage.
It also puts software rivals su…
