{"id":548286,"date":"2006-03-20T08:35:05","date_gmt":"2006-03-20T08:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/548286-tech-intellectual-property-exodus.html"},"modified":"2006-03-20T08:35:05","modified_gmt":"2006-03-20T08:35:05","slug":"tech-intellectual-property-exodus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/548286-tech-intellectual-property-exodus.html","title":{"rendered":"Tech intellectual property exodus?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font size=\"2\">Prism\u2019s exit follows that of FrontRange, which delisted in January after being bought out by American private equity firm Francisco Partners for $185,2m. FrontRange owned the rights to a number of popular software programmes that dealt with business process outsourcing.<\/p>\n<p>Why the seeming exodus to overseas markets by these South African companies? <\/p>\n<p>Information technology (IT) analyst Irnest Kaplan of Kaplan Equity Analysts says that besides names like fleet management company DigiCore, Spescom (which has proprietary voice recording and data management solutions) and UCS (which specialises in IT solutions for retailers like Clicks and Pick \u2018n Pay), there are not many of these companies on the JSE.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn the main, most of our IT companies in South Africa are selling software or products that come from overseas. We don\u2019t generally have many companies with their own tangible intellectual property. And the ones we do have are few and far between,\u201d he explains. <\/p>\n<p>Kaplan says the move to the US has to do with the efficient allocation of capital to good intellectual innovations: \u201cIf an idea is good, the capital will stay with that idea and it will run with it. If it isn\u2019t, the company will fold and the capital will go elsewhere, looking for other ideas. If you look at markets like the US, that whole sort of system is so efficient and so well developed that it\u2019s actually amazing. You go there, and if you\u2019ve got a good idea, capital will basically hunt you down, whereas in South Africa you may find the odd investor that might be interested.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The size of the American market is another attraction: \u201cYou need a huge market as well. So if you\u2019ve really got a good idea that\u2019s your own, you want to leverage it in as many markets as possible. Trying to do that from South Africa is not that easy, as most of our companies have found out,\u201d says Kaplan.<\/p>\n<p>In terms of retaining the listings of companies like DigiCore, Spescom and UCS, Kaplan says each \u201chas their own reasons why they may stay or may not stay\u201d, although staying depends very much on their success overseas. \u201cThey may always keep a listing here and try and go for a listing overseas, or they may delist the company because some other investors find it more attractive to put capital in and take the company off the market.\u201d <\/font><\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\">Source:\u00a0 <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/www.moneyweb.co.za\"><font size=\"2\">http:\/\/www.moneyweb.co.za<\/font><\/a><\/p>\n<p \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The JSE is about to lose another technology firm with intellectual property (IP) to its name \u2013 secure payments firm Prism \u2013 as former JSE firm (now domiciled on the Nasdaq) Net 1 Applied Technologies succeeded in fending off Altech\u2019s advances to buy out shareholders at R1,16 a share.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-548286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}