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Vishwanath Kulkarni
C. Shiv Kumar

Board meeting this week

Bangalore June 17

Treading its business philosophy of `acquire, enhance and expand,' Cranes Software International Ltd is close to buying out the Bangalore-based anti-virus software maker Proland Software.

Sources confirmed that Cranes was in advanced stages of talks with Proland Software for a complete buy-out. The board of Cranes is expected to meet this week to consider the acquisition.

Tracking the acquisition buzz, shares of Cranes have gained over 17 per cent in the past one month. In fact, shares of Cranes hit a 52-week high at Rs 139.50 on June 7.

Anti-virus offerings

The proprietary firm Proland Software has been in the business of designing, developing and supporting anti-virus software products for over 15 years. While the exact revenues of Proland were not known, it is estimated to be around a couple of crore rupees.

Proland has anti-virus offerings on almost every platform, namely Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and NetWare among others. Sold under the Protector Plus brand, Proland's anti-virus software products have users in over 100 countries. Proland derives about 65 per cent of its revenues form the US market, while Europe was its second largest market.

Through the Proland acquisition, Cranes was trying to make a come back into the anti-virus software market, sources said. Cranes was initially an anti-virus software distributor when the company started operations in 1991. Cranes proposes to re-launch Proland's anti-virus software products, especially in Japan, where the anti-virus software market is pretty robust.

Cranes Software, which deals with engineering and scientific software tools and products, has been fairly active pursuing an aggressive in-organic growth strategy in recent years. Through a series of acquisitions over past few years, Cranes has managed to buy-out the entire product range of SPSS Science, a division of the US-based SPSS. Cranes' other buyouts in past two years included Engineering Mechanics Research India Pvt Ltd, InventX Inc, Analytix Systems and Capella.

For the quarter ended December 2006, Cranes clocked a net profit of Rs 26.4 crore on sales revenue of Rs 67.4 crore, a growth of 68 per cent and 46 per cent respectively over corresponding quarter last year.

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