Industry News
All documents are provided in their native Language. Titles with an asterisk (*) are available in both English and French.
November 2008
The world in November 2008 is a very different place as we accelerate into the economic maelstrom that seems to be front and centre whatever we read! A number of companies announced layoffs related to the economy including Nokia, Nortel, Palm and Circuit City. There was however movement in the M&A world which is probably a reflection of strong companies looking to get stronger. ATT&T paid $944 Million for Centenial Communications and Fujitsu paid $575 Million to buy out Siemens from a joint venture. There were a number of other deals, involving such names as Oracle, Microsoft’s Razorfish, Intel, Amdocs, Satyam, Citrix and Perot Systems. It also looks like Sanyo will be swallowed up by Panasonic, which is likely to be a big deal when it happens. More…
October 2008
For October 2008 the big news continues to be the meltdown in the financial markets and talk of gloom, doom, recessions and depressions! The number one worry for IT professionals seems to be increasing work loads, the number of IT jobs in the US dropped by 2% quarter over quarter and Symantec, eBay and Yahoo all announced significant layoffs. Intel is investing big time into China and IBM continues to grow and prosper in India. On the M&A front a $5.8 billion merger of telcos in the US was the big deal of the month, with rural telephone company Century Tel buying its bigger peer Embarq. Ebay, despite announced layoffs, had some big purchases in Bill Me Later ($945 million) plus Denmark companies Ben Bla Avis and BilBasen ($390 million). Symantec paid $695 million for MessageLabs, Tata paid $505 million for Citi’s Indian BPO arm and HP paid $360 million for LeftHand Networks. More…
September 2008
September 2008 was once again overshadowed by the financial markets, the collapse of investment banks and the potential bailout by the US Government has been filling the headlines. It was interesting that Forbes released its list of wealthy Americans now, with Bill Gates topping the list and Larry Ellison a couple of spots down. A Spherion survey suggests that IT people are worried for their jobs in this economy but here in Canada, Statistics Canada tell us that employment is up. HP announced they will dump about 24,000 jobs through the EDS merger, but it will result in 12,000 new jobs (they didn’t say where). On the M&A front, to be expected there were no blockbuster deals this month . There was, however, some activity with McAfee and Microsoft. Other household names making acquisitions included Google, Red Hat, Intel, Oracle and Cisco. Perhaps the most interesting purchase was by Best Buy, who paid $120million for Napster. More…
August 2008
This past month did not bring much good news for the economy. Spherion tells us that worker confidence is down and both Canadian and US employment numbers fell. Having said that predictions are for pretty healthy spending in the IT space with Gartner predicting an 8% increase in spending this year, to $3.4 Trillion. On the M&A front, there was a fair bit of activity which is consistent with a down economy when stronger companies look to improve their position through lowered valuations and by taking advantage of weakened acquisition prospects. Amongst the big movers this month were Ricoh, Bae (UK), and Compucom. Also, hard on their heels was a big move by Indian outsourcing company Infosys. A biggish one for Canada was the private equity buy of Q9 networks for $360M by CDC Acquisition. Other notable companies on the acquisition trail included IBM, Oracle, HP, Nortel (a couple of small ones), AOL, McAfee and Google. More…
The big deal this month is the purchase of Foundry Networks by Brocade Communications. IBM had a couple of acquisitions as well as British Telecom, Microsoft, and Open Text. Other noteworthy companies in the M&A space included Virgin Mobile USA, Oracleand Cisco. We saw some conflicting reports this month, as some announced record IT employment and an increase in IT budgets in the US, where others said worker confidence and employment numbers in Canada were down. Gartner released a tough report about security in the cloud computing world and the “spam king” Robert Soloway was jailed for 47 months. Bell Canada made an announcement that 2,500 management jobs will be cut, and Apple surpassed Acer to become the number 3 PC vendor in the US. AMD’s CEO quit after seven consecutive quarterly losses and Alcatel Lucent also saw changes at the top. Finally, July also saw the official retirement of Windows XP! More…
June 2008
June of 2008 saw an economy that is being rocked by high oil prices, the fallout from the sub debt crisis, and signs of inflation. Consumer confidence is at record lows and the number of mass layoffs in May was the largest since 2003. Yet forecasts for the IT industry suggest growth in 2008! A “down” economy always has some affect on the M&A markets, making companies a little more cautious in spending their money, and others looking to take advantage of reduced prices! There were a couple of billion dollar deals this month along with the smaller M&As with names including The Carlyle Group, Cadence, Nokia, Cogeco, and Symbian. More…
