Canadian Business profiled their picks in each of twelve different sectors. Their technology pick..
Technology
By Paul Kaihla | July 10/24, 2000
Do you know how many mutual funds currently hold Canada?s favorite high-tech stock, Nortel Networks Corp. (TSE: NT)? An awe-inspiring 1,381. An army of analysts cover it, too. Sixty-one in all. And get this: about 80% of them rate it as some sort of buy. It would be the easiest thing in the world for us to sit back and do the same?to tell you to pony up the premium for a price-to-earnings ratio of 1,427. But we don?t see much value added in that. Instead, let?s deke around the star players in Canada?s high-tech rink and talk about, say, DataMirror Corp. (TSE: DMC). It?s considerably more speculative than Nortel, for sure. But the upside may be more divine.
DataMirror, based in Markham, Ont., specializes in software that allows companies to integrate incompatible databases. It?s Canada?s fastest-growing software firm, with revenue for its latest quarter up 40% over the previous year. Analysts predict the company will soon be profitable. But the kicker is its 27% stake in PointBase Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. That company is expected to launch an IPO on the Nasdaq by the first quarter of 2001, and it should be a doozy. PointBase has developed a Java-based tool for handling large amounts of data on handheld wireless devices and Internet appliances.
PointBase makes DataMirror a kind of embedded systems play, and we like those. We like the fact that of the seven billion chips that will be produced this year, 90% of them will not end up in PCs but will be embedded in things such as factory robots, home appliances and handheld devices. Starting with the latter, those embedded systems are going to be networked like crazy over the next few years. It could be a computing revolution that dwarfs the PC. |
