05.25.07

Novell Stock Buyback Speculations; Expansion Overseas; Sentinel 6 is Out

Posted in Asia, Finance, Marketing, Novell at 11:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Over at SeekingAlpha, Eric Savitz opines that Novell might initiate stock buybacks, just like Microsoft. Additionally, following what might become a trend, we also hear about an aggressive hiring programme in India.

Novell has appointed Naresh Shah as managing director of Novell India Development Centre in Bangalore. This appointment adds onto his current role in Novell as vice president of Global Engineering Strategy. Naresh brings to Novell over 20 years of experience in the technology industry in Asia. Prior to this, he was product manager for Lucent for Mexico, with added responsibilities of managing Lucent’s relationship with AT&AT and its joint ventures in the Asia Pacific region. Novell’s India Development Centre is the second largest R&D centre for Novell worldwide and it is continuing its rapid expansion plans through an aggressive hiring programme.

Meanwhile, Novell has announced the availability of Sentinel 6.

Novell today announced that its next-generation real-time security event management product, Sentinel 6 from Novell, is generally available worldwide.

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A Single Comment

Shane Coyle said,

May 25, 2007 at 11:09 pm

A bit about buybacks for those of us who are finance-impaired (me):

Buy-backs are intended to give investors increased confidence. The logic goes something like this: if a company buys back its own stock, the share price should go up – first, there are fewer shares outstanding after the buy-back so each share represents a greater portion of the company’s total equity, and second, with fewer shares outstanding the company’s earnings per share and book value per share figures should look more attractive, which might have a positive effect on the stock. A buy-back is also said to counteract the dilutive nature of employee share incentive schemes. But buy-backs do not always result in the share price going up. For one thing, the company has had to spend some of its cash reserves – which really belong to the shareholders anyway. While the buy-back seems to counteract the dilutive effect of employee stock options, all companies are really doing is transferring the problem: the dilutive effect of the employee share incentive schemes is now directly visible on its balance sheet where that huge pot of cash used to be. But just as importantly, by definition buying back stock means that the company feels there is no better way of using that cash reserve than ploughing it into the stock markets to buy its own shares – it does not feel that investing that cash in additional personnel, assets, intellectual property, or even other businesses would be a better use of that money. For some, it could be seen as the last desperate measure of a management team which has run out of inspiration.