The Swiss technology company Ascom seems to become a financial trading object. Some owners sell while others invest driving the stock up 30% since last Friday. Seller: Tito Tettamanti, Buyer: Victory Industriebeteiligung AG from Vienna (now 20%) who has also invested into another Swiss technology company - Oerlikon.
Ascom was formed in 1987 combining the three companies Autophon, Hasler and Zellweger Telecommunications. Since 2000 Ascom has been constantly reorganized, selling, closing or spinning off nearly everything, leaving just 20% of its revenue back in 2000. Ascom is profitable now though and seems to attract investors who are possibly buying more shares such as e.g. the 7.5% that Hasler still owns. One can assume that the new investors have short-term ROI expectations as well and might not be interested in building - for once - on a longer-term strategy, that would be more than simple cost cutting; which is what they did since 2000 pretty much only.

Would you have known the answer? It is the German catalogue seller Otto. Quite well known there, but certainly not much outside the country. In 2006 they did online business worth 2.9 bln EUR. Quite a number! They started business in 1949, have 55'000 employees worldwide, 14.57 bln total revenue and pre tax profit of 459 million EUR. This is quite impressive for a pretty unknown company (internationally at least). I would also never have guessed that their online business is so big. But of course it makes a lot of sense to move a catalogue business online for many reasons - not only cost. The reason why Otto was in the news today is that there will be a change in management. Mr. Michael Otto will become Chairman and hands over the CEO job to a successor. IT and telecom gear is done by Actebis - a well known distributor - which is also owned by them. The Otto website seems to be super fast - definitely using latest technology. Also an indication that they understand online sales extremely well.

Sales numbers of Sony Ericsson, the Japanese-Swedish mobile phone joint venture, are stronger than ever. Based on those record numbers they are ready to face Apple, who will of course attack primarily in the music phone market - which is currently SonyEricsson's strongest segment. End of 2007 we will know if this will indeed hurt them or make them even stronger in light of the big competition coming up.

Q4 2006 Highlights:

• Year-on-year volume & sales growth of over 60%
• Income before tax up 144% year-on-year
• Hit products drive market share gains