Philippine typhoon deaths climb into thousands
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Reuter site - Fairfax struggles to raise funds for BlackBerry bid: sources
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Fairfax struggles to raise funds for BlackBerry bid: sources
Fri, Nov 01 19:22 PM EDT
By Soyoung Kim, Nadia Damouni and Nicola Leske
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd is struggling to raise financing for its $4.7 billion bid for BlackBerry Ltd, with several large banks declining to participate on concerns that the smartphone maker will not be able to reverse its fortunes, according to people familiar with the matter.
Fairfax, which is run by Canadian financier Prem Watsa, is working with Bank of America Merrill Lynch and BMO Capital Markets to put together a lending syndicate for a deal, but they have been turned down by several large lenders, the sources said.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch and BMO both have deep pockets themselves, and it is still possible they will muster the necessary financing for Fairfax to submit a definitive bid.
Fairfax, the largest shareholder in BlackBerry with a 10 percent stake, reached a tentative $9-per-share deal with BlackBerry in late September, and has until November 4 to negotiate a definitive agreement.
Several other potential bidders are also mulling participation in BlackBerry's future. The deadline for them to submit bids for the company is also Monday.
Fairfax and BlackBerry declined to comment.
The difficulties Fairfax has had in raising financing underscore the fading relevance of BlackBerry, which once pioneered on-the-go email but has bled market share to Apple Inc's iPhone and devices using Google Inc's Android software in recent years.
Should Fairfax fail to put together a bid for BlackBerry, a deal could still be possible with other technology companies in the sector. BlackBerry founders Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin have also declared their interest in buying BlackBerry.
Lazaridis and Fregin are working to submit a joint bid with private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday. Chipmaker Qualcomm Inc also may join the bidding group, that person added.
It was not clear whether Lazaridis and Fregin would overcome the financing hurdles that Fairfax faces. Cerberus and a spokesman for the two founders declined to comment, while Qualcomm did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
STRATEGICS MAY BE TEAMED UP
BlackBerry also remains in discussions with several technology companies about a deal, the people familiar with the matter said this week, asking not to be named because the matter is confidential.
The company's advisers are looking to pair up the technology companies that are pursuing different parts of BlackBerry, which include hardware, operating systems, patent portfolios and network assets, the people said.
BlackBerry has held talks with a number of companies including Cisco Systems Inc, Google Inc, SAP AG, Lenovo Group Ltd, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics Inc and Intel Corp about selling part or all of itself, Reuters previously reported.
Some of these companies, including SAP, have since walked away from the deal, although the situation is fluid and there is possibility that interest may be renewed, two people said. A SAP spokesman said BlackBerry did not fit with the company's strategy.
WATSA'S BID
In a September 25 interview with Reuters, Fairfax Chief Executive Watsa - often described as Canada's answer to Warren Buffett - said he was confident his consortium could find the money needed to fund their bid.
However, the proposal has met with rising skepticism as BlackBerry's prospects continued to darken. The company in September reported a quarterly loss of nearly $1 billion after taking a writedown on unsold Z10 phones.
Adding to the company's woes, it's likely to burn through almost $2 billion of its cash pile in the next year and a half, Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu wrote last month.
Canada's top pension funds - widely considered to be among the most likely backers of Watsa's proposal - declined to comment. However, some of their influential heads have already publicly indicated that they are unlikely to play any role in a bid for BlackBerry.
"No one has really committed themselves to any group because none of the people that have been circling around BlackBerry have come up with a very convincing business plan," Alberta Investment Management Corp's head Leo de Bever said on BNN Television, earlier this week.
The head of Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec - Canada's second-largest pension fund told Bloomberg last month that the Caisse was also unlikely to invest in BlackBerry, as it prefers investing in more predictable businesses such as Coca-Cola Co and Colgate-Palmolive Co.
(Reporting by Soyoung Kim, Nadia Damouni, Nicola Leske, Greg Roumeliotis in New York and Euan Rocha in Toronto; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Reuter site - Big data heralds return of the Cray supercomputer
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Big data heralds return of the Cray supercomputer
Sun, Oct 20 07:33 AM EDT
By Bill Rigby
SEATTLE (Reuters) - "Big data" means big computers, and good news for Cray Inc.
The pioneer of supercomputers in the 1970s stood on the brink of obscurity 20 years ago but is now surging back to prominence. Its shares have almost doubled over the past 12 months.
The explosion of data - measuring weather, traffic, health and countless other areas - coupled with a desire to tease meaning out of it, demands greater computing power than is accessible via standard machines.
"The assumption was that supercomputers were cliche five years ago. People thought, 'I can run my simulation on my laptop'," said Barry Bolding, a Cray vice president, at the company's Seattle headquarters last week. "That may have been true, so long as the data associated wasn't growing as well. But raw data is being created in exabytes as we sit here. More data means bigger computer, bigger computer means more data."
Experts estimate that 2.5 exabytes - or 2.5 billion gigabytes - of data are now generated every day, and the world's capacity to store that data is doubling every 40 months, which all plays to Cray's strengths.
A basic Cray cabinet costs $500,000 and up and is roughly the size of a refrigerator. Big customers can group 200 or more into massive supercomputers worth hundreds of millions of dollars, such as "Titan" at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Titan, completed by Cray last year, is the world's third-fastest supercomputer, takes up the size of a basketball court and can perform more than 20,000 trillion calculations a second.
To be sure, most companies will never need that scale, or can process what they need through multiple machines running in tandem on a high-speed network or in the cloud, which for many projects works out cheaper and more power-efficient.
What makes supercomputers different is that they can make a huge number of interconnected calculations at the same time, rather than a consecutive list of unconnected calculations, which makes them good for running complex simulations and mining unrelated data.
For example, weather apps on smartphones are based on vast models run by research agencies on supercomputers. Financial firms can detect online fraud or cybersecurity breaches in seconds rather than days by using supercomputer models, which would take days on standard set-ups.
"Big data is a new term, but arguably the supercomputer market was the original home of big data, and Cray has been dealing with it forever," said Steve Conway, an analyst at tech research firm IDC.
MARKET ON FIRE
The Seattle-based company, with just over 900 employees and a market value of around $940 million, has changed ownership several times but was started in 1972 by Seymour Cray, the "father of supercomputing."
With a recent resurgence in supercomputers, Cray is garnering Wall Street's attention. This June, it sold one of its new XC30 supercomputers to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts for $65 million, nabbing a contract from a long-time IBM customer.
That sort of deal is piquing investor interest. Wall Street analysts are expecting revenue of $519 million this year, up 23 percent from 2012, with a gross profit margin around 34 percent. Its shares are up 91 percent over the past 12 months while rival Silicon Graphics International Corp's are up 90 percent. Cray is now richly valued, with a share price 36 times estimated earnings for the next 12 months, compared with 19 times for SGI.
The global market for computers costing more than $500,000 is on a tear, according to IDC, having more than doubled to $5.6 billion in 2012 from $2.7 billion in 2008.
The whole market for high-performance computing (HPC) - essentially any machine bigger than a desktop used for intense computation - is forecast to grow 7 percent a year through 2017, well ahead of the stagnant business server market.
The U.S. government directly or indirectly accounted for two-thirds of Cray's revenue last year. But the company is reaching out to new customers interested in big data. Last year it set up a new unit called YarcData - Yarc is Cray backwards - to focus on analyzing huge amounts of information and teasing out unseen patterns in a process known as graph analytics.
"Unstructured databases are becoming more prevalent, gathering raw data from everywhere," said Cray's Bolding. "Now you start asking very complex questions, and it starts to create links between sets of data."
The YarcData unit is helping the U.S. government detect fraud patterns in Medicare and Medicaid payments. Private sector customers include medical research group Mayo Clinic and several financial services, life sciences and telecommunications firms, which Cray cannot name for contractual reasons.
New efforts are working and should boost revenue over time, said Sid Parakh, an analyst at fund firm McAdams Wright Ragen.
"This is not a commodity market. It takes years of experience," said Conway at IDC. "It's easy to build a big computer, but it's not easy to build a big computer that works."
(Reporting by Bill Rigby; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Twitter quitters dog IPO
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Friday, October 11, 2013
Reuter site - U.S. cable companies should create Netflix rival: Malone
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U.S. cable companies should create Netflix rival: Malone
Thu, Oct 10 17:10 PM EDT
By Liana B. Baker
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cable pioneer John Malone said on Thursday that cable companies should team up to create a rival to Netflix Inc <NFLX.O> that would deliver programming over the Internet on a national basis.
Cable companies could "solve the problem" of high programming costs by acquiring content for an Internet-based service under one brand that they would sell in a bundle with broadband, Malone said at Liberty Media Corp's <LMCA.O> annual investor conference.
Malone, who is chairman of Liberty Media, used the example of Comcast Corp's <CMCSA.O> Xfinity video streaming product one day being shared with the rest of the cable industry to become a national brand.
He added that another alternative would be for Hulu to "be bought and syndicated" by cable companies or for an entrepreneur to create a new product from scratch that the cable industry can get behind. He had said previously that cable companies should make a joint bid for Hulu, the Internet streaming service that was for sale at one point.
The cable industry has a history of working together, and he pointed the creation and funding of HBO, saying it "made us all rich."
A national Internet-based TV service could help the cable industry get back market share from satellite and telecommunications competitors, and also give a boost to smaller cable companies that lack infrastructure.
When asked about whether he still has an appetite for a merger or acquisition, Malone said that, if cable came up with a transformational product to rival Netflix, it would "increase my appetite as an investor to be willing to invest in the business through consolidation."
Malone, whose media holding company has an investment in cable provider Charter Communications Inc <CHTR.O>, made an offer for Time Warner Cable Inc <TWC.N> over the summer, but it was rejected, Reuters has reported.
Time Warner Cable shares closed up $6.68, or 6 percent, on Thursday at $116.95 per share.
During a question and answer session with investors, he praised Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings and launched into an analysis of Netflix's business model, saying it was big enough to buy exclusive national content at good prices, something the cable industry has struggled with.
"The cable industry has been very slow (which has) created a window of opportunity to the over the top guys," he said, referring to Internet based TV services such as Netflix.
Wunderlich securities analyst Matthew Harrigan said that Malone's cooperation idea was a good one. But he added it would be difficult to get all the players on the same page because the large companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable have more advanced technology than the smaller players.
"It's kind of like herding cats," Harrigan said about cable companies working together
Earlier on Thursday, another one of Malone's companies, Liberty Interactive Corp <LINTA.O>, said it would split into two tracking stocks, and also create a new company made up of its stake in TripAdvisor Inc <TRIP.O>.
(Reporting By Liana Baker; Editing by David Gregorio, Ronald Grover and Andre Grenon)
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
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