Astex gold, CSR completes, HiWave progresses, Ant inches on, Asterand struggles
A week of typical stock market grind this week, no multi-billion acquisitions, though a reminder that Cambridge firms do pay hundreds of millions for US companies, not just the other way around.
CSR closed its £300m acquisition of Zoran - as covered here - and announced a multi-year licensing agreement with Monster to get its Bluetooth chips into a new range of high-fidelity wireless speaker and headphone products.
SuperGen is paying $120m to merge with Astex Theraputics, but one feels its the Cambridge company that will be the future driving force.
As of a week Monday, SuperGen will change its name to Astex Pharmaceuticals, the same day its ticker symbol on Nasdaq will switch from SUPG to ASTX.
More worrying was news from Asterand and a real - 'material' as the announcement called it - danger of the human tissue supplier not being able to continue as a going concern due to difficulties in meeting its financial obligations. We wrote about it in greater detail here on Wednesday.
Internet television firm, Ant plc, is inching towards profitability.
In its half year report, the company described its revenues as remaining steady, which means they barely grew (H1 2011: £2.14m, H1 2010: 2.11m), however, while it still made a pre tax loss it was much reduced and expects to eliminate it entirely by 2012, in other words, break even next year.
It said it managed to reduce the loss by lowering operating costs, but revenues remain level despite an increase in the number of licenses signed and units shipped.
The company is in this for the long-term, but will be hoping a world with combined broadband and TV comes along sooner than later to provide some stronger sales figures, though it seems to be heading in the right direction.
Licence and royalty revenue increased 6 per cent, consulting fell 9 per cent. The total number of units shipped was up 13 per cent to 1.71m, however, the number of customers shipping over 50,000 units fell from seven in 2010 to five.
A 25 per cent revenue drop (2011 H1: £679k, 2010 H1: £902k) and a 43 per cent increase in pretax loss (2011 H1: (£1,524), 2010 H1: (1,065)) wasn't going to ruin David Bramwell's day.
The HiWave Technology chairman said component sales for July and August were equal to that of the preceding six months, an acceleration that vindicates its switch from a licence to components sales business model.
"The success of the change to a component sales model is now starting to show through," said Bramwell in the interim results of the company formerly known as NXT.
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