Pic: Andy Ryan (Stone) via Getty Images.
ASX Tech Stocks: Internet connectivity player Uniti up after multiple takeover approaches
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- UWL reports acquisition approaches from several parties
- HTG teams up with maritime satellite comms company Inmarsat
- Weebit Nano reaches density milestone with its ReRAM technology
The telco provider and NBN platform was up 9.5% in early morning trade today, sitting at $4.05 – a more than 2,000% to its 2019 listing price of 20c.
In November 2021 the company proposed an on-market share buyback of 10% of all issued shares, subject to the prevailing share price, market conditions and alternate uses of capital, and today UWL flagged that it had received takeover offers.
“In the interests of ensuring that the market is fully informed prior to commencing the share buyback, the company notes it has received approaches from more than one party indicating potential interest in an acquisition of the company, which as of this time, do not include detail as to timing, price or conditions,” the company said.
UWL went on an acquisition streak last year, and became the largest private owner of fibre infrastructure in the greenfield residential Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) market, second only to the government-owned NBN after picking up Opticomm and Telstra’s (ASX:TLS) Velocity estates and South Brisbane Exchange.
Harvest Technology Group (ASX:HTG)
The remote operations tech player was up 5.3%, signing a master services agreement to join maritime satellite communications company Inmarsat’s new maritime initiative as a Certified Application Provider (CAP).
The CAP network is an ecosystem of providers that offers dedicated applications for use with Inmarsat’s Fleet Connect service to make data capture, analysis, and intelligence easier, and enhance efficiency, safety, and sustainability for ship owners and operators.
Harvest will offer its livestreaming Infinity technology together with Fleet Connect dedicated bandwidth as a one-stop-shop packaged service direct to Inmarsat’s customers.
And Inmarsat will promote and market the solution to its maritime customers and channel the leads to Harvest for conversion.
It’s all part of Harvest’s plans to secure a hefty slice of the maritime pie by the end of 2022.
“This MSA, coupled with our reseller agreement with Speedcast, will provide Harvest access to over 55,000 maritime vessels,” HTG Group CEO Paul Guilfoyle said.
“We are working closely with other major groups to further expand our coverage to secure our target of a minimum of 1,000 maritime licenses by the end of 2022.”
A pilot scope is currently underway with one of Inmarsat’s major maritime customers which is the operator of more than 150 vessels.
Weetbit Nano (ASX:WBT)
Down 0.9% was semiconductor developer Weebit Nano, which has demonstrated its first operational crossbar arrays that combine its ReRAM technology with a selector.
This is a key milestone on the company’s path to creating discrete (standalone) non-volatile memory (NVM) chips.
And it all comes down to density.
Because discrete memory chips consist of large arrays of memory cells, they require extremely high densities to contain as much memory as possible on the same piece of silicon – and the one transistor one resistor (1T1R) architecture used in embedded ReRAM arrays is not sufficient as the transistors are too big.
The company’s crossbar arrays were developed using a one selector one resistor (1S1R) architecture that enables the high density needed.
Plus, this architecture also allows Weebit’s arrays to be stacked in 3D layers so they can deliver even higher densities.
Weebit says this means it has applications in storage class memory, persistent memory and as a NOR flash replacement and for AI architecture such as in-memory computing and neuromorphic computing.
Eroad (ASX:ERD)
The transportation technology services company was down 1.1% today, off the back of its December quarterly.
The company’s total contracted unit growth was 70,736 units – an increase of 53.5% – which it said reflected the Coretex acquisition and organic growth in Australia and New Zealand.
However, the company did say that operating conditions have become more challenging since December with the Omicron COVID-19 wave impacting EROAD staff and customers.
But there’s room to grow in the North American market, with units increasing by 50,725 over the quarter, and gross organic sales of 2,091 offset by churn from customers using EROAD branded products.
Coretex delivered a further 671 net units in December, and also has signed contracts across the construction, mixed fleet and refrigeration segments for approximately 2,600 additional units which commence roll out in Q4 FY22.
