Flagged this one up on another board thread the other day and said it was one to watch very carefully. It more or less as a momnopoly position within the growing IPTV market. It has a good management, is moving into a profit making company , now has positive cash flow and has around 13 million cash in the bank, enjoys margins of around 80% yes 80% and works with some of the biggest Tech companys on the planet.

Contracts should be announced very soon which should lead to a pushing of the price upwards. The spread is an off puter but you can normally deal within side it. Citywire have tipped this one so I will post their findings below.

DYOR

Orca could be a whale of an opportunity

By: Joanne Wallen, Associate Editor Citywire 3/02/2005



Orca Interactive is off to a good start as a separate company having spun off from Emblaze in October and with the might of HP and now IBM behind it, Orca should be a force to be reckoned with.

Shares (ORCA) in the AIM-listed company are unchanged at 126.5p today, well above the 93p flotation price and valuing the business at 43.2 million.

The Israel-based company, which states its earnings in US dollars, saw revenues for the year to December grow by 106% to $5.2 million while losses decreased to $1.8 million (953,000) from $4.9 million. The company had $24.5 million of cash on the balance sheet.

Orca offers a complete suite of applications to fixed line telecoms companies, enabling them to offer television services over their telephone networks (IPTV). The software covers everything from the user interface (every click on a remote control), to integration with a telcos back-end billing and customer interface systems.

IPTV is just starting to take off as telecoms operators upgrade their networks to IP (internet protocol) or data networks. The telcos, losing out from declining voice revenues and competition from the cable operators, are now looking to offer services such as video on demand and full broadcast television over their networks.

Orca has already announced relationships with Hewlett-Packard, Lucent, Nortel, Nokia and Siemens, and today added IBM to the list. These companies will resell its software and act as systems integrators.

Chief executive Haggai Barel told Citywire he expected to be able to announce deals with these partners very soon. At present, Orca still has to provide a considerable amount of professional services to customers, but in the longer term Barel hopes that its partners will provide all of this and Orca will revert to being a pure software players, with margins to match. Gross margins are already nearly 80%.

The companys main competition comes from Alcatel, which has its own software but is also looking to be the systems integrator for that software. This is likely to inhibit any of the major systems integrators from dealing with it, and leaves the rest of the market open for Orca.

Citywire Verdict:
It is clearly still early days, but Orca is in there ready for what looks like being an explosion in IPTV. Few network operators will have a choice. They will have to compete for customers television and internet business, or lose out in a big way.

The fact that the two major competing hardware manufacturers and systems integrators, IBM and HP, have chosen to work with Orca sounds like very compelling endorsement both of the technology, and of the fact that there are few viable competitors out there. Well worth a punt for those that like the risks inherent with IT stocks.

cheers GF.

May get covered by the two share mags aswell later in the week.

cheers GF.

Another promising announcement made this morning, SP slightly down at the moment after yesterday rise but it looks like these are back on track.
db66

If this is so good why does the price keep dropping-any theories ?