19th May 2008 09:31
Emblaze Ltd. ("Emblaze" or "the Group") Interim Management Statement
Ra'anana, Israel, 19 May 2008 - Emblaze is today announcing its first Interim Management Statement for the period commencing 1 January 2008 through 31 March 2008 (the "Reported Period"):
Trading Update
Performance during the Reported Period remains in line with management planning and expectations.
The Group's Growth arm, Formula Systems, maintains its operational progress as its subsidiaries continue to gain traction within their sectors.
The Innovation arm companies, namely Emblaze Mobile and EMOZE, continue to make strides according to their development plans on both the Monolith mobile device project as well as the EMOZE BlackBerry*-like push-mail services.
Financial position
There has been no significant change in the Group's financial position during the first three months of 2008. Emblaze's balance sheet remains strong.
Outlook
The first quarter of the year is normally quiet. Nevertheless, we are pleased with the Group's performance during the Reported Period. The positive momentum in the Group's Growth business is continuing and the activity of the Innovation arm is closely monitored in order to mitigate the risks. We will continue to strengthen our business, both organically and via targeted mergers and acquisitions and in light of the general market conditions, we remain cautiously optimistic of our prospects for the year as a whole.
Overview
During the Reported Period, the subsidiaries of our Growth arm, Formula Systems, achieved the following: Matrix IT (TASE: MTRX) continued to lead the Israeli IT marketplace as it signed, amongst other deals, a NIS20 million agreement with Bezeq, Israel's largest telecommunications service provider, to continue the implementation of its CRM program. The project is expected to take up to 18 months until completion at the end of which, the CRM system will be deployed in all of Bezeq's sales and service centers.
Magic Software announced its new revolutionary rich client application platform that is the industry's first platform enabling developers to use a single paradigm to develop a Rich Internet Application that abstracts the Client and Server partitioning, and can also deploy in a hybrid mode-on-premise as well as on-demand. Magic also unveiled its application platform suite to provide the functionality of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Enabled Application Platform (SEAP). The move is in anticipation of the growing demand from application vendors to repackage their applications as a SaaS offering. In addition, Magic's iBOLT¢â€ž¢ business integration suite was made available through salesforce.com's AppExchange. The iBOLT business integration suite enables instant and real-time access to information in other business applications. Magic also continues to sign leading SAP Business-One-Partner to resell Magic's iBOLT Special Edition for SAP Business One. Coastal Range Systems is one of the most successful SAP Business-One resellers signed in North America.
Sapiens International Corporation formed a partnership with CGI Group Inc. to provide insurance carriers a complete insurance administration suite with CGI's Ratabase ‚® Rating Solution. The new alliance strengthens Sapiens' rating offering with more sophisticated tools. During the Reported Period, Sapiens also repurchased some of its convertible debentures (Series A) in the aggregate amount of approximately $2 million, nominal value.
Turning to the Innovation arm of the Group, at Mobile World Congress 2008, EMOZE has launched an upgraded version of mobile client for mobile devices with Synbian60 and WindowsMobile operating systems that support the majority of web-mail and ISP personal accounts. EMOZE has also launched a new Enterprise Edition that provides faster, cheaper and more secure mobile push-email to businesses and their staff. With the Enterprise Edition, emails are pushed through to the user's device, in real-time, as soon as a connection is made available and allows the business user to communicate securely.
Emblaze Mobile continues to invest its efforts towards completion of development of the next generation mobile device ("Monolith") together with Sharp and Access of Japan. Sharp is expected to begin mass production of the Monolith in the first half of 2009.
Emblaze VCON Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of ZONE-IP Ltd. , expended its international reach with the appointment of MMG-Multimedia GmbH Germany as exclusive distributor for Russia, Central, Western and Northern Europe for the distribution and support of Emblaze-VCON's full line of videoconferencing products. In addition, Emblaze V CON has recently released the vPoint HD v8 Executive, the first full high definition desktop videoconferencing client able to receive 1080p, enabling users to view H.323 1080p (1920x1080 pixels) video while sending 720p high resolution video and AAC-LD audio. The vPoint HD Executive also offers ISDN networking up to 4 x BRI, a detachable window for data sharing and Windows Vista SP1 support.
On 10 March 2008, the Group announced that its subsidiary, Orca Interactive Ltd. , has agreed the terms of its acquisition by Viaccess S.A., a wholly owned subsidiary of France Telecom SA, through a cash merger that was approved by the shareholders of Orca at a general meeting on 15 April 2008.
* BlackBerry is ‚® of RIMEnquiries:Emblaze Hadas Gazit, Hagit Gal + 972 9 7699302/ 339 About Emblaze
Emblaze Ltd is a group of technology companies addressing both growth and innovation activities thus combining the stability of "bread and butter" mature technology enterprises with "high-risk / high-reward" investments in innovation.
Our Growth arm includes Formula Systems , which harbors the following subsidiaries: Magic Software Enterprises Ltd. develops, markets and supports composite application development and deployment platforms with a service-oriented architecture (SOA), including application integration and business process management (BPM), with existing and legacy systems; Matrix IT Ltd. (TASE: MTRX) is one of Israel's leading integration and information technology services companies, active in four principal areas: software solutions and services, software products, infrastructure solutions and hardware products, and training and assimilation.; Sapiens International Corporation N.V. is a provider of IT solutions that modernize business processes to enable insurance and other companies to quickly adapt to changes; and nextSource Inc., designs, develops and implements web-based, high quality, innovative human capital management solutions.
Our Innovation arm includes Emblaze Mobile, a designer of advanced mobile devices; EMOZE, a provider of Push Email and synchronisation technology for mobile devices; and ZONE-IP (Emblaze V CON), a provider of wireless video communications technologies and conferencing solutions for operators and enterprise markets over IP networks.
The Emblaze Group is traded on the London Stock Exchange since 1996. www.Emblaze.com
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