At the end of the technology conference in New York organized by the Salomon Smith Barney investment house on Friday, the organizers published a new method of evaluating shares, and several changes in their recommendations for Israeli shares. Analyst Victor Halpert prefers companies with exposure to the consumer chip and security markets. He therefore recommended “Market Outperformer” for DSP Group (Nasdaq: DSPG), Zoran (Nasdaq: ZRAN), M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers (Nasdaq: FLSH), ECtel, and Verint. The only target price he raised was for M-Systems, from $11 to $13. Halpert lowered his target price for DSP from $30 to $25, for Verint from $18 to $15, and for Zoran from $28 to $25. He lowered his recommendations for Alvarion (Nasdaq: ALVR) and Ceragon Networks (Nasdaq: CRNT) from “Buy” to a new category – “In-Line” with the market. He left his target price for both shares unchanged at $3.
At the conference itself, M-Systems president and CEO Dov Moran gave an extremely optimistic presentation, as expected. He noted that the company’s recent agreement with Toshiba is the company’s most important in recent years. Toshiba will commence sales to cellular device manufacturers in about six months, and M-Systems’ royalties will vary between 2% and 6%. Moran said the new, smaller DiskOnKey (DOK) device with a designated chip would be launched soon. Special applications will be launched at the same time. The biggest potential is in the new DOK, which is capable of communicating directly with another DOK without a computer. It is likely to prove a hit with teenagers for trading music and video files with each other.
Moran also announced that IBM (NYSE: IBM) will once again distribute the DOK, after abandoning M-Systems for a competitor early this year. I think this might be because of M-Systems’ lawsuit against its competitors for patent infringement.
Moran explained the notorious Nokia (NYSE: NOK) conundrum in original fashion, saying, “We have a very large customer, who manufactures cellular devices. If you buy its device and open it up, you’ll find our chip inside.” As I’ve written previously, this is the US 9290 and European i9210 device, which you can open with a screwdriver. In this context, Moran mentioned that Victor Halpert opened the DOK of MicroVault, an ostensible competitor of Sony Corporation (NYSE: SNE), and found M-Systems’ chip inside.
By the way, the Yahoo board is very good, you might want to check flsh over there |
