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Investing

Business Objects Goes On The Block

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Le Figaro has run a story saying that business intelligence software provider Business Objects (BOBJ) has put itself up for sale, retaining Goldman Sachs. The company would probably draw interest from Oracle (ORCL) or SAP (SAP). On Friday, the company’s shares were downgraded to "neutral" from "buy" by First Albany. The analyst may look a little silly when the shares open on Monday.

But, it may be a difficult time to sell the company. At times during the last two weeks, BOBJ share have been up as much as 40% on the year. Finding a buyer who would pay a premium over that may be a nice trick. The company currently has a market cap of $4 billion.

In the most recent quarter BOBJ revenue grew year-over-year to $363.2 million from $294.5 million. The company earned $21.6 million, or 22 cents per ordinary share and American Depositary Share, compared with $7.9 million in the same quarter a year ago. The company did say that the next quarter would be weak and lowered guidance.

With the stock near a five-year high and signaling some near-term weakness, BOBJ will be hard to shop.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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