I've bought Caere yesterday at 8 5/8. I believe it's way oversold and that the HP "news" is smoke, as it only affects lite documanagement software- the weaker revenues-, if anything. We don't know the details and it hasn't been announced by Caere as a material change.
Aside from the present value of CAER, what I really like is that it remains a relatively "unwed" consumer entry point. What is interesting for me is the growing software verticle integration practices. In other words, Caere's documanagement lines can lead or point to other products of Adobe or Macromedia to name a few. To give an example. My wife recently purchased Dreamweaver. The program recommended using Netscape; not only that, it would only play Shockwave movies on Netscape, not IE (even though I had it loaded), as the documentation said. At these price levels it is a takeover target. And the technical analysis points to a price of 14.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that most of Caere's revs come from bundling lite versions of software. It's from their OCR lines. I've checked out their pricing and it is NOT wildly different than Scansoft's on the lower product lines. Throw in the fact that Scansoft seems to be ignoring or even phasing out their Paperport line in favor of Pagis, and I really think that Caere is undervalued. Plus ScanSoft seems to have abandoned the Macintosh market (my pet peeve). And Caere is strong in Europe right when their econs could be rising again.
Rather than buying small startup companies with Caere's cash (a waste of money IMO), I'd use it to form some jv's with companies such as Adobe, Macromedia, Metacreations, Microsoft, Kodak and Apple, Yahoo/Excite/AOL, etc. Some ideas include: remote production of scanned images (pay as you go), universal shared scanning (scan direct to shared web sites), some school net scanning jv (Apple w/iBook& imac?).
Sincere |
