The current economic climate has many investors scrambling for cover, and that includes a number of VARBusiness 500 companies. Thursday morning, however, several companies with high-end stock prices climbed a bit over yesterday, but only one is seeing year-over year stock growth.
Microfocus (2008 VB500 rank 268), a U.K. company with U.S. headquarters in Rockville, Md., saw shares rise almost 5 percent to $280.50 Thursday morning. That's up 13.7 percent from one year ago. Its stock price has clearly benefited from the software vendor's interim earnings report, which showed revenue up 24 percent to $135.6 million from $108.9 million in 2007. In addition, the company said yesterday it would make available Micro Focus COBOL for Eclipse, the rapidly growing open-source ecosystem.
Tata Consultancy Services' (2008 VB500 rank 18) stock is down overall, 49 percent year over year, but was up nearly 7 percent, to $510.50 Thursday morning from Wednesday's close. That figure might be partially due to TCS' announcement Wednesday that it planned to hire more than 3,500 people in China over the next four years. The increase is targeted at growing its business there and at tapping the country's large pool of engineers. India's largest IT firm also said it expects revenue from Asia to grow next year despite the economic slowdown and retrenchments by the region's banks, due to its large pipeline of existing projects.
London-based Misys' (2008 VB500 rank 201) stock is down 45.2 percent year-to-date but it did climb nearly 4 percent from Wednesday in early trading, to $99.50. Wednesday, the company said that one of Egypt's leading banks, Egyptian Saudi Finance Bank (ESFB), had chosen Misys Equation 3.9 for its 11 branches. The solution is the latest version of the popular retail banking solution from Misys and will help ESFB to provide improved services to its customers.
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Five Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week For the week ending Feb. 10, CRN looks at five companies that were either asleep at the wheel or just didn't make good decisions. |
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Five Companies That Came To Win This Week For the week ending Feb. 10, CRN looks at five companies that brought their 'A' game and made moves to beat out competitors |
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10 Challenges That HP Wants Partners To Tackle Right Now CRN speaks with HP's business unit chiefs to get a sense of where they'd like partners to focus in the coming year, as well as how CEO Meg Whitman is making a difference. |
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