HP to buy over EDS for about US$13B

Recent rumours about Hewlett-Packard (HP) intention to buy over Electronic Data Systems (EDS) has been confirmed, after they released the official statement this week about their multi-billion dollar M&A plan.

By acquiring this world leader in outsourced IT services, the merged entity will form a giant IT services provider big enough to directly rival with IBM Global Services.

If this deal come to reality, it will also indirectly impact on the recent multi-billion outsourcing plan from SITI operations to EDS announced just about a month ago.

Is HP making a right move this time, and won't repeat the same mistake of recent acquisition of Compaq, which was one of the root cause for Carly Fiorina to be forced to step down, and nearly lead to the breakup of the company? Nevertheless, this move certainly brings uncertainty to all the parties involves, especially to their employees and the IT job market.

Meanwhile, the new IBM building in Cyberjaya, which is opposite the EDS building, is close to completion by now.

Ornasteel

Ornasteel (彦钢控股, 5094) posted its 1st quarter result for financial year 2008 today. It has shown a strong recovery from the relatively poor results of last 2 quarters in 2007. Its revenue increased by 14.7% from preceding quarter, and profit before tax increased by 65.7%. Its net profit also increased by 60.36% as a result of net profit margin improved to 7% from 5% in preceding quarter. Its NTA grown to RM1.90 per share, which is 15.85% above its closing price of RM1.64 today.

Ornasteel has been renowned in excellent cash flow management. When it was first listed on Bursa Malaysia at 30 December 2004, it had net borrowings of about RM130 million. It managed to turn into net cash position within a short period of time, and its net cash has accumulated to RM75.4 million as reported in today's quarterly report, grown by 40.15% from previous quarter (RM53.8 million). In fact, it is now among the financially healthiest steel companies in Malaysia, backed up by a blue chip controlling shareholder of Taiwan largest steel maker, which is also one of the top 5 most profitable steel player in the world.

During the 2nd quarter of the year, which result will be posted 3 months later, Ornasteel has adopted to offer their products to customers on a monthly pricing basis instead of the usual quarterly pricing basis. Beside that, the Malaysia steel market was also liberized starting from 12 May 2008. Ornasteel also proposed to change the company name to CSC Steel Holdings Berhad which shows the prominent relationship with its mother company, China Steel Corporation (中钢公司). It is showing sign of moving towards stronger fundamental and better result.

Disclaimer: This article is intended for sharing of point of view only. It is not an advice or recommendation to buy or sell any of the mentioned stock counters. You should do your own homework before trading in Bursa Malaysia.

7-Zip the free and open source file archiver

I noticed that a lot of people have WinZip and/or WinRAR installed in their computer, and most of them remain unregistered. Both of them are famous file archiver utility applications, and they are shareware, meaning you can try them out for free for a limited period of time. After that, if you are satisfied and want to continue to use them, you have the obligation to pay for the software.

What if you are not willing to pay for your file archiver utilities? Then you should uninstall them from your computer. However, you also have the option of using open source file archiver utility, which you don't need to pay for it and you can freely use it, copy it, redistribute it, even bundle it with your own application. 7-Zip is the one you are looking for.

7-Zip is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It is a file archiver with high compression ratio and comes with its own 7z compression format which can compress files even better than ZIP and RAR format. It is available in both GUI version and command line version, and its source code is available in Source Forge repository.

Here are the features of 7-Zip:

• Works in Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista.
• Has ported version for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, DOS, etc.
• Localizations for 69 languages.
• High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression.
• Supported archive formats:
  - Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR.
  - Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS.
• For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip.
• Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats.
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format.
• Integration with Windows Shell.
• Powerful File Manager.
• Powerful command line version.
• Plugin for FAR Manager.
  

To download 7-Zip, click here.