Globe and Mail
Corel rises as recovery expected
Stock continues gains after new versions of flagship
software released
SIMON TUCK
Technology Reporter
Friday, June 11, 1999
Ottawa -- Corel Corp. shares moved higher yesterday as the volatile software maker anticipates a return to the black following the release of new versions of its two flagship software programs.
The Ottawa-based company's shares hit a intraday high of $4.93 on the Toronto Stock Exchange before easing back to $4.65, up 17 cents. The stock is up almost 50 per cent since slipping below $3.20 in late March. Trading volumes, which topped 415,000 shares yesterday, have been climbing steadily over the past week.
Corel released new versions of its two main products -- the CorelDraw graphics package and the WordPerfect office suite -- late last month. The company hopes the new releases will help it recover from a horrible first quarter that saw it lose 24 cents a share, or $14.6-million, to Feb. 28 on revenue of $40.3-million.
Despite the product releases and a series of recent press announcements, analysts said they didn't know what was fuelling the jump in share prices yesterday.
"I'm scratching my head too," said Ralph Garcea of Scotia Capital Markets in Toronto. "It's always been a retail stock driven by press releases."
Michael O'Reilly, Corel's chief financial officer, also said he didn't know why the share price jumped so high early yesterday.
But over the past year, Corel stock has been attracting renewed interest from some institutional investors, who had almost completely abandoned the company during some tough times in recent years. New information shows that institutional shareholders now hold about 9 per cent of Corel's stock, which is still low compared with the institutional ownership of many technology companies, but is a dramatic rise from about 1 per cent about a year ago.
The data, produced by the Nasdaq Stock Market, also show that the top five institutional buyers of Corel bought more than five times as much stock as was sold by the top five institutional sellers of Corel during the last quarter.
The top five buyers were Boston Co. Asset Management; Dreyfus Corp.; Mellon Bank; Barclays Global Investors Canada Ltd.; and Kennedy Capital Management. Only Barclays held shares before this most recent period.
Analysts said the institutional buyers may be buying shares from Novell Inc., which has sold more than half of the 8.3 million Corel shares it owned less than a year ago. Novell, which sold the WordPerfect office software package to Corel in early 1996, now owns about 3.7 million Corel shares. |
