Topic: How To Invest

Pat: Can I get your opinion on the company called Kinaxis? Thanks

Article Excerpt

Kinaxis Inc., $47.86, symbol KXS on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 24.1 million; Market cap: $1.1 billion; www.kinaxis.com), provides cloud-based software that big companies use to manage their supply chains. The business concept is SaS—software as a service. Subscribers pay a monthly or yearly fee for software implementation, support and upgrades. This provides the software company with steady income, rather than series of larger one-time payments for the initial sale and upgrades. Kinaxis’s main product is RapidResponse. Applications include matching functions like production and inventory to demand, analyzing sales patterns and forecasting. This Ottawa-based company has a much longer history than most new issues, and is much more mature as a business. It was founded in 1984. It operated under the Webplan Inc. name until May 2005, when it changed its name to Kinaxis. It first sold shares to the public at $13 and began trading on Toronto in June 2014. The stock wasn’t a hot new issue. It moved sideways during its…