Volante Trading Holt
N
N
0Overall Score

Shares in the beleaguered Commander target, Volante Group, were placed into pre-open this morning at the company’s request.

The trading holt will remain in place until Monday morning or when a significant market sensitive announcement is made by the company.

The company has been fighting off an unwelcome takeover bid by communications player Commander for the past month following a disastrous fall in its share price. The company’s shares fell from $1.40 to $0.67cents in the final calendar quarter after an earnings downgrade warning was released in early November.

The hostile takeover bid (priced at $1.01 per share) launched just prior to Christmas, pushed the shares to $1.14 where they were prior to the trading halt – the shares closed at $1.13 yesterday.

While the Volante Board has rejected the Commander offer as “opportunistic” it has yet to come back with an official ‘Target’s Statement’ which is due to be sent to shareholders today.

In the interim, the company has announced a significant win being selected as preferred tenderer for the South Australian Government’s Distributed Computing Support Services (DCSS) procurement arrangements following the dismantling of the whole-of-government outsourcing deal the SA government has with EDS. That contract is due to expire in 2007 promising significant sales to the likes of Volante, which is expected to achieve revenues of up to $20 million per year from the SA Government.

The announcement was a slap in the face for Volante detractors which have criticised CEO Ian Penman’s push to invigorate the company’s services business.

The company has also announced a deal with network storage solutions vendor NetApp to integrate the latter’s unified storage technology with infrastructure solutions and services from its existing vendor and professional services portfolio.