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Brazilian PC maker Positivo Informatica on Thursday said it had rejected Lenovo’s offer to acquire the company, but that it was open to entering an alliance with Lenovo. Lenovo offered 18,00 Brazilian Reals US$7.70 per share to acquire a majority stake, but an agreement couldn’t be reached as it wasn’t in the best interest of Positivo’s shareholders, the Brazilian PC maker said. However, Positivo is open to an alliance with Lenovo or other PC makers. Such an alliance could be aimed at PC distribution, for instance.
Sony could raise the European prices of some of its products more than 33 percent due to the strengthening of the Japanese yen versus the U.K. pound and the euro. With economic uncertainty set to continue into 2009, Sony said it has not determined the exact price increases, but that most products would not rise more than 33 percent. Sony said it expects other companies may do the same. The rising yen means Japanese products are more expensive for buyers outside Japan. It also means it takes more foreign currency to buy the same amount of yen, which cuts into profits.
Research In Motion announced financial results on Thursday that matched a warning it gave earlier this month, but executives said sales of the BlackBerry Storm touch-screen handset and other new products are brightening the company’s future. RIM’s revenue in the third quarter ended Nov. 29 was US$2.78 billion, up 66 percent from a year earlier. Net income was $396.3 million. The reported profit met analysts’ expectations compiled by Thomson Financial, while revenue was slightly below the consensus estimate of $2.82 billion.
Red Hat Thursday unveiled a new service aimed at making it more cost-effective for its customers to run and maintain one version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a longer period of time, reducing management and administration costs. xtended Update Support, a new maintenance option for Enterprise Linux customers, allows them to standardize their IT environments on a version for 18 months instead of six months, which is the current time frame for Red Hat’s maintenance contract. Red Hat will support whatever standard version of Enterprise Linux a customer is on with bug fixes and updates for 18 months, which means customers won’t have to recertify or update all of their applications and hardware for a new version of RHEL until that period is over,
…And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.
