Tough year on the stock market for Silicon Fen's Top Ten but Autonomy sparkles
When the chief executives from the top ten firms by market capitalisation in the Cambridge cluster of high tech companies – supposedly the hottest bed of hard innovation in Europe – fire up the desk tops after the Christmas break and check their stock prices, only three of them will see a share price substantially higher than this time last year.
Star performer and now comfortably the largest publicly listed corporation run from Cambridge is Autonomy Corporation, the guys who use smart maths to do very sophisticated data management and search for very large enterprises. CEO Mike Lynch will see a share price that has grown 76% and a market cap approaching £2 billion. That's a stellar performance in the face of the woes suffered by so many others as capital markets grapple with the implications of a teetering US economy and no better indication that it has a product whose time has come.
Second-placed ARM Holdings, Silicon Fen icons and chip designers par excellence, slipped 12.7% during the year, despite analyst forecasts showing good earnings growth through to at least 2009. ARM is now a mature business with a substantial market position that sees its expectations get battered by the overall level of economic activity.
Silicon Fen's Big League (by stock market capitalisation)
| Silicon Fen's Top 10 | £ millions |
| Autonomy Corporation | 1,983 |
| ARM Holdings | 1,431 |
| CSR | 641 |
| Aveva Group | 587 |
| Domino Printing | 344 |
| Acambis | 139 |
| Abcam | 114 |
| Meldex International | 108 |
| Xaar | 101 |
| Alizyme | 100 |
Third spot is filled by CSR plc, world leaders in Bluetooth and WiFi design with a dominant market position. Their shares shed almost 25% last year and so the group is now worth £641 million. Not too long ago it was worth comfortably north of a billion. It's still making profits and is forecast to see pre-tax profits grow by something approaching 50% by 2009. But the stock market gurus seem to be convinced there's a limit to CSR's blue sky. Here's hoping new CEO Joep van Beurden (pictured), appointed in November, can change market perceptions in 2008.
Fourth place deserves an honourable mention. The strong performing engineering software group Aveva held its own during the year, seeing its share price gain just 1.8%. It continues to gain bouyancy from strong performing ship building and other big engineering industries.
The other top tenners to gain share price were Abcam, which sells antibodies over the Internet, up 14.4%, and vaccine-maker Acambis, up 25%, even though it is still operating in the red.
The biggest losers in the top ten were drug designer Alizyme, down 41%, and print head makers Xaar, down 31%. Xaar said last week that it expects to announce solid growth in revenue and pre-tax profit for the year ended December 31st. Speciality pharma Meldex International lost 24%.
Domino Printing were down a modest 5.8%
The biggest loser in all listed Silicon Fenners last year was Screen Technology, which is developing very large LCD screens, whose share price was down 96%.
But we at Silicon Fen Business Report don't like to get too caught up in the focus on the short term. Who are the big three gainers over the past five years that haven't been swallowed up in a takeover? 1st place: Aveva, up 644%. Second place: Autonomy, up 608%. Third place: Xaar, up 532%. More power to them!
13th January 2008
