Mosaid is Cantech Letter's 2011 Canadian Tech Stock of the Year
Cantech Letter, an online magazine focusing on Canadian technology stocks, has announced its 2011 Canadian Tech Stock of the Year. The digital magazine, founded in 2008 by Nick Waddel, heralded Ottawa's Mosaid as the winner. A panel of five judges, including Tom Liston of Versant Partners, Barry Richards of Paradigm Capital, and Tom Astle of Byron Capital, Byron Berry, determined the winner.
Mosaid has performed well for several years, ignoring the recession to climb from $7 in 2008 to $30 in 2010. It managed to keep up the momentum this year. As Cantech noted, "in 2011, the world seemed to become hyper-aware of the potential value of patents." With that in mind, Mosaid's share price continued its ascenion and became a takeover target of Sterling Partners a couple of months ago. Today the stock trades for $46, exactly what it was acquired for.
Mosaid, which can date its history back to 1975, was once best known for its key circuit technology, an innovation used in the memory of most of the world’s computers. It wasn’t until 2007, however, that the Ottawa company went virtual and decided to get out of the memory test equipment manufacturing and semiconductor IP design and focus on defending a stable of patents that is especially strong in memory, such as DRAM and Flash, and has strength in Wi-Fi, Power over Ethernet, and microcomponents.
Meanwhile, Jim Skippen was crowned the 2011 Canadian Tech Stock Executive of the Year. Mosaid's Senior Vice President of Licensing and General Counsel, Cantech touts Jim as "the best thing that ever happened to shareholders of Mosaid."
Cantech also noted that 2011 marked a modest resurrection of the tech IPO scene in Canada (and America for that matter).
In the latter half of this year Canadians were reintroduced to something they may have thought extinct; the technology IPO. Some of Canada’s fastest growing technology companies, such as Toronto’s NexJ Systems (TSX:NXJ), Burlington’s Ecosynthetix (TSX:ECO) and Vancouver’s Avigilon (TSX:AVO) collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars in recent listings.
