5/4/10

Mpartners RES Canadian Small Cap Tech Index - April

Published for institutional investors earlier today. The bottom line is that small cap technology stocks have demonstrated 12.5% better YTD returns than the main index. Even with solid returns so far this year, the Small Cap Tech Index is still trading at an earnings discount to the main index, inferring that there remains future upside. During April, approximately $92M in capital was raised, with OTC making two acquisitions. OTC bought Nstein for approximately $32 M, and then followed up later in the month with an acquisition of Burntsand for approximately $12M.

Various sources continue to call for a secular bull market for the technology sector due to a current IT replacement cycle, and the emergence of the mobile web which could be up to five times the size of the fixed line internet measured in terms of users.

Commentary on BNN regarding RKN, BWC and SVC

On Friday April 30th, at 3:15, I was guest on BNN discussing three mobile ecosystem companies that I initiated official coverage on with Mpartners.

The investment concept is this: mobile operators worldwide are experiencing a data capacity and congestion crisis that is expected to get exponentially worse over the coming five years as web enabled smartphones proliferate the market. Even with significant network capacity upgrades, operators will continue to run up against capacity challenges and quality of service issues. Network optimization solutions will be required to help more efficiently manage how data is used in order to offset the expenses associated with network upgrades. With smartphones using 40 times more data than a typical feature phone, 10 million web enabled smartphones use as much data capacity as 390 million feature phones. According to Cisco, mobile data capacity requirements are forecasted to grow at a parabolic CAGR of 108% over the next four years. At the same time, subscriber ARPU is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of only 10%.  As a result, mobile operators will struggle to grow profitably as they support popular smart phone devices like iPhone and Android platforms.

Investors can benefit from this problem by participating in the upside potential of the three software-oriented mobile infrastructure stocks that I mention in the clip. Often complimentary, sometimes competitive, each company plays at a different level within the stack from billing (RKN) to policy (BWC) to network awareness (SVC).   Here is the link.

http://watch.bnn.ca/trading-day/april-2010/trading-day-april-30-2010/#clip296311

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