Megabuyte - Technology sector intelligence

BT announced on Friday that it has reached agreement with the UK Government concerning cost efficiencies, driven by the government’s current spending review.  The company has reiterated its outlook for the year, suggesting that the cuts were already anticipated, in obvious contrast to Cable & Wireless Worldwide – Premium Plus readers see here. The nature of the cuts appears to be much less than some of the more lurid headlines might have suggested. Read our full review in Newswire Plus.

Redstone sells maintenance businesses to Maintel

Redstone has continued its clean up with the sale of two maintenance businesses to Maintel for £1.75m, representing the first of the non-core disposals highlighted by CEO Tony Weaver in our recent discussion with him (Premium Plus readers see here). Based on figures released by Redstone, Maintel is paying 6x EBITDA, though with scope for reasonable synergies given the acquired business’s unimpressive c10% EBITDA margins. Read our first thoughts on the deal in Newswire Plus.

Bullish first half for Lombard Risk

The first thing to say about interim results from Lombard Risk Management is that, having taken a full six months to get its final results out, the company has significantly raised its game by publishing its interims less than three weeks after the period end. Not only is the timing better, but the results themselves are a substantial improvement on last year; as highlighted in the recent trading update. Premium subscribers can read the full story in Newswire Plus.

GB Group enjoys strong first half; raises full year expectations

Identity management specialist GB Group has issued an upbeat trading statement this morning in which it says that results for the year to March are likely to be ahead of current market expectations. Revenues in the first half were up 10% to £11.5m and the business generated a healthy profit of £0.7m; more than double that achieved in H1 2010. Driving the strong performance seems to have been primarily the DataSolutions business which has now started to differentiate itself by integrating GB’s proprietary data management capabilities into its database solutions. The Data Authentication business is said to have enjoyed modest growth in the first half. Net cash and the end if H1 was £4.6m; up from the same time last year but down from £5.7m at the year end. Having hit a low of 17p a year ago, GB shares have all but doubled since as trading has improved.

Mobile Peer Group Report, October 2010

Just a reminder that we published our regular monthly report on the Mobile sector on Friday - four mobile companies reported results in the last month, with mixed fortunes. Velti is growing strongly from mobile advertising, Vyke and Zamano have been through tough times, though Zamano seems to be stabilising, whilst Mobile Tornado is starting to gain traction with its push-to-talk technology. Probability and Telit released positive updates for their respective mobile gambling and m2m activities. Industry M&A continued, with Velti buying Mobclix and Synchronica closing its iseemedia acquisition, whilst Synchronica and Globo both raised funding for their mobile email activities. Ubiquisys raised another $10m, bringing recent femtocell fundings for Ubiquisys, PicoChip and ip.access to $46m. Premium subscribers can download the full report here.