NetSuite Prices I.P.O. at $26 Per Share
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NetSuiteâs shares priced at $26 apiece late Wednesday, far above the expected price range of $13 to $16 that it initially reported in its registration to go public.
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Pancake restaurant IHOP Corp.  plans to buy Applebee's International Inc.  for $25.50 per share, the companies said on Monday.
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Oracle says its latest bid to purchase PeopleSoft is its &quot;best and final offer.&quot; At $24 per share, Oracle&#39;s offer is higher than PeopleSoft&#39;s 24-week high.
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In the last full trading week of the year, the NetSuite IPO, acquisition news and earnings reports from Oracle, Palm and RIM highlighted technology sector gains, but also concerns for 2008.Oracle on Wednesday reported net income of $1.3 billion for the quarter ending Nov. 30, up 35 percent from a year earlier. The report validated its acquisition strategy at the end of what is bound to be a record year for M&amp;A in the tech sector.&#160;Oracle&#39;s results&#160;show it is leveraging homegrown as well as acquired products, cross-selling a broad variety of business applications. Company shares closed Thursday at $22.10, up by $1.34.The U.S. Federal Trade Commission&#39;s approval on Thursday of&#160;Google&#39;s acquisition of online ad-server DoubleClick&#160;helped boost Google shares by $12.32, to close at $689.69, even though the deal requires other government body approvals.Through November 2007, tech M&amp;A amounted to about $449 billion, close to the total for 2006, according to a report released this week by the 451 Group. With a strong December for M&amp;A, 2007 &quot;could be the first year in tech M&amp;A history to top a half-trillion dollars&#39; worth of transactions,&quot; according to the report.There are a variety of reasons for the banner M&amp;A year, but underlying them all were strong vendor earnings. But next year will likely see a slowdown in deals.The U.S. housing slump and resulting turmoil in financial markets has raised fears of an overall slowdown in the economy. This could affect consumer and business buying plans as well as the financial results of tech vendors.&quot;There&#39;s a sense of muted expectation,&quot; according to the 451 Group&#39;s Brenan Daly. &quot;Corporate buying activity reflects to some degree consumer activity. If you are flush with cash and expecting good things from the economy, chances are you&#39;re more willing to go out buying.&quot;Meanwhile, the&#160;IPO of software-as-a-service vendor NetSuite&#160;on Thursday reflected a year for public offerings that was ultimately stronger than expected. Company shares closed at $35.50 after opening at $26.00. IPOs this year underscored confidence in sectors such as SaaS and storage, noted the 451 Group report. In the SaaS arena, SuccessFactors and DemandTec had strong IPOs. In the storage sector, Data Domain and 3Par had solid IPOs, 451 noted.But the same factors that are likely to contribute to a slowdown in M&amp;A will also probably cause a slump in IPO activity in 2008.Most IT market researchers are forecasting a slowdown for at least the first half of next year. Growth in U.S. IT investment, for example, will drop to 4.8 percent in 2008 from 5.3 percent in 2007, according to Forrester Research.In a year of tepid sales, only the best-run companies are expected to have the full confidence of investors. This week&#39;s earnings reports from Palm and RIM are a case in point. Palm shares dropped to their lowest point in four years on Wednesday, closing at $5.52, after the company reported a quarterly loss of $9.6 million for the quarter ending Nov. 30. Last year the company earned $12.8 million for the period. Palm stock has dropped about 50 percent in the past two months.Reporting Thursday on the same quarter, RIM said BlackBerry sales boosted earnings to $370.5 million, compared to $175.2 million last year. Shares jumped by about $10 in after-hours trading, about an hour after the announcement.Handset markets are booming, but vendors face some of the same pressures as PC makers: Competition has lowered margins. Vendors need to get it all right: good products, good management, and well-managed logistics.&quot;We view RIM as extremely well-positioned due to carrier partnership strategy, talented management and technology,&quot; said Citi Investment Research in a market commentary. On the other hand, Citi fretted that &quot;we are increasingly concerned with Palm&#39;s internal controls.&quot;Especially in the most competitive sectors -- such as PCs, handheld devices, telecom and Internet-based businesses -- 2008 will leave much less room for error than 2007, which, despite economic turmoil, turned out to be a strong year for tech earnings overall.&#160;
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If the success of NetSuite&#39;s IPO this week was any indication, the market for on-demand ERP software is red-hot. Startup NetBooks hopes to capitalize on that.NetBooks recently began offering hosted ERP software. But the company, based in Rohnert Park, California, has set its sights on a particular class of customer: The millions of small, owner-managed U.S. businesses with between two and 50 employees. &quot;It&#39;s the backbone of the economy,&quot; said NetBooks&#39; founder, Ridgely Evers.Evers has long played in this space. While at Intuit, he led the creation of QuickBooks, the popular accounting software.NetBooks&#39; core suite covers marketing, sales, inventory, and finance, but doesn&#39;t include functions like e-mail or calendaring. &quot;We&#39;re not a Microsoft Office replacement,&quot; Evers stressed.The product is engineered for ease of use, he said: &quot;For our target market, IT is the word &#39;it.&#39;&quot;NetBooks has added other capabilities through partnerships, including PayCycle for payroll and UPS Online Shipping. The firm will make major new partner announcements in early 2008 and release new software features throughout the year, according to Evers.Evers declined to discuss how many customers the firm has landed so far, saying only, &quot;we&#39;re very early in our growth.&quot;NetBooks costs $200 per month, or $1 per hour, for five users, along with free access for a customer&#39;s bookkeeper, accountant, and &quot;marketing coach.&quot; Unlimited support -- accessed by clicking a button within the NetBooks software -- and free upgrades are included in the price. The company also says that if a customer signs up for the service at a given price, they will never pay more for it.One analyst said NetBooks shows promise but faces many challenges.&quot;If they do in fact do all the things they claim to do, this is great,&quot; said Marc Songini of Nucleus Research in Wellesley, Massachusetts.&quot;They&#39;re doing a smart thing by offering these [third-party] integrations so customers don&#39;t have to do it,&quot; he added.Still, he said, &quot;They&#39;re very small and don&#39;t have a lot of recognition. It&#39;s going to be tough for them to get up and running and get critical mass.&quot;For one thing, NetSuite does sell its service to small businesses, Songini said. Also, if a giant like Google began offering a similar suite of hosted applications, startups like NetBooks would be hard-pressed to succeed, he said.The other challenge centers on marketing. Larger ERP and CRM vendors have clear sales targets: C-level executives. The small business market may be immense, but it is also broad.&quot;Obviously, that bottom segment of the market is wide-open, but the problem has been, how do you sell to it,&quot; Songini said.Songini said one possibility would be for NetBooks to strike reseller deals with computer manufacturers and retailers like Dell or Radio Shack.
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NetSuite Inc, a software maker  majority-owned by Oracle Corp  Chief Executive Larry  Ellison, on Tuesday raised the estimated price range for its  initial public offering to $16 to $19 per share and said it is  conducting the IPO as a modified Dutch auction.
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oogle today cut the estimated price range of its initial stock offering by about a quarter, to between $85 and $95 a share, valuing the Internet search engine company by as much as $25.8 billion.
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NetSuite has raised the estimated price range for its IPO (initial public offering) to $16 to $19, from the original $13 to $16.The company made the disclosure in a document filed Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.The company is&#160;following the lead of Google in conducting an online, auction-style IPO, instead of having underwriters set the price.&#160;The auction opened on Dec. 10&#160;and NetSuite said at the time it expects the stock&#39;s price to be finalized on Wednesday.NetSuite, which sells a line of hosted business software, is putting up 6.2 million shares of common stock. NetSuite expects to net about $98.4 million after expenses from the IPO, it said in the filing. That estimate assumes the stock will price at $17.50.NetSuite has said it plans to use money generated by the IPO to pay off an $8 million balance on a line of credit with Tako Ventures, an entity controlled by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and to possibly make acquisitions.Ellison controls about 60 percent of NetSuite&#39;s outstanding stock, which works out to about 31.9 million shares. He plans to put those shares into a &quot;lockbox&quot; limited-liability company, a move that would &quot;effectively eliminate&quot; his voting control and thereby avoid potential conflicts of interest, NetSuite has said.
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$21 per share? You're having a laugh Oracle scoffed at BEA last night, describing the middleware's self-set $21 per share price tag as "impossibly high" and saying it had no intention of raising its offer.â¦
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Ottawa has set a price per share of C$64.50 ($50.42) in the sale of its 19 percent stake in Petro-Canada (PCA.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) , as analysts
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Oracle again extended its tender offer for PeopleSoft to Friday, Sept. 10 at midnight, Eastern Standard Time. Oracle is offering $21 per share or about $7.
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Office goods supplier Staples  proposed a 7.25 euros per share offer for Dutch peer Corporate  Express  on Tuesday, valuing it at around 2.5 billion  euros ($3.68 billion) and sending its shares soaring.
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Google Inc., the world's most popular  Web search engine, on Wednesday slashed the price range on its  eagerly awaited initial public offering (IPO) to between $85  and $95 per share from between $108 and $135 per share.
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Faced with strong investor demand, NetSuite has raised its IPO pricing range by 46 percent since setting its initial range earlier this month. The on-demand enterprise applications company anticipates setting its final IPO price after the markets close We
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Oracle has signed a definitive agreement to acquire PeopleSoft for $26.50 (Â£13.79) per share, or about $10.3bn. The transaction has been approved by both companies&#39; boards of directors and is expected to close by early January.
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Software manufacturer Oracle Corp. said Monday that it raised its hostile bid for rival PeopleSoft Inc. to $24 per share from $21, and said the new price represents the company&#39;s &quot;best and final offer.
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Oracle Corp. sent yet another letter to PeopleSoft Inc.&#39;s board of directors on Monday morning, pointing out that a majority of PeopleSoft&#39;s owners are prepared to sell at $24 per share and requesting once