Megabuyte - Technology sector intelligence

Shares in mobile money pioneer Monitise are trading 8% higher this morning as the company issues a wide ranging statement covering trading, a fundraising and its strategic alliance with Visa. The company strengthened its strategic relationship with Visa, raised a further £32.4m equity gross from Visa, First Eastern and institutional investors that will see it through to cash flow breakeven, and announced FY10 revenues of £6m, with strong growth particularly in transaction revenues. These moves further strengthen Monitise’s position in the emerging mobile money space. Premium subscribers can read our thoughts on the news in Newswire Plus and readers can see our recent investment notes on Monitise here.

Ubiquisys raises $9m to support femtocell push

We initiate coverage this morning on Ubiquisys, the femtocell vendor, following its announcement that it is supplying Softbank of Japan in one of the world’s largest femtocell deployments to date, and has just secured $9m in new funding. The Softbank deployment is ground-breaking, not least because Softbank will be giving away femtocells and the necessary supporting DSL broadband connection free to subscribers who apply, effectively outsourcing expansion in the capacity and coverage of its network. This contract, plus other emerging femtocell deployments such as SFR in France, will enable Ubiquisys to go from being heavily loss making to becoming profitable during this year. Premium subscribers can read the full initiation note here and Premium Plus subscribers can view the full profile here.

Steady recovery continues for Computacenter in H1

Infrastructure services player Computacenter has issued its H1 period end update this morning indicating that trading is in line with expectations. Underlying revenue growth in the first half (excluding the disposal of the trade distribution business) was 7%, although the growth rate in Q2 was slightly lower than Q1. Profits for the first half were 10% ahead of H1 2009 and net funds at the end of June were £95m, up from £47m a year earlier. Interestingly, growth in product sales (6%) was similar to growth in services (7%) in the first half. The two European businesses continue to swap trading performance; in this period, it was France’s turn to perform well whilst German was weaker. Read our first thoughts in the statement in Newswire Plus.

NHS reforms good for ACS, EMIS… after the chaos

We were interested to read about the fundamental reforms to the structure of the NHS announced yesterday and our thoughts immediately turned to the impact they would have on the two main listed primary care software providers; EMIS and Advanced Computer Software (ACS). In essence, what is happening is that responsibility for commissioning care in the NHS is being transferred from Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) and Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) to GPs. The media has reported the possibility of up to 70,000 redundancies resulting from this move but it seems rather unclear how GPs are going to take on this burden without needing to re-hire a significant proportion of those made redundant from PCTs and SHAs. Read our views on the likely impact of these reforms on ACS and EMIS in Newswire Plus.

Encouraging end to the year for K3

ERP Solutions supplier to the retail and supply chain sector K3 has issued a period end update this morning for its (new) year ended June and it seems that the year has finished strongly. The Retail division, which has been on a recovery track for a while, has made ‘good progress’ during the year and the Manufacturing business, which has been slower to recover, is said to have experienced a marked pick up in its pipeline towards the year end. Even after significant acquisition activity, net cash at the year end was around £11m, down from £13.5m a year earlier although up from the seasonally strong end of December figure. Read our full analysis in Newswire Plus.

Pinnacle mows up Grass Roots contract

Business telco Pinnacle has announced a relatively large contract this morning, to provide inbound and outbound voice services to Grass Roots (a £265m revenue international marketing organisation) for one year to five of its UK offices, worth approximately £0.75m. This compares with existing annualised revenues of £6m or so, based on the recent interims (Premium Plus readers see here), and therefore represents reasonable organic growth.