Aliso Viejo’s Quest Software Inc., a maker of business software, is set to buy back some of its shares for the second time in a few months.
The company’s board of directors recently gave the green light to a stock buyback totaling up to $100 million.
In December, Quest paid $143 million for roughly 11% of its outstanding shares, for a total of $12.50 per share.
The buybacks likely means that Quest would rather propping up the company’s stock instead of making acquisitions.
Wall Street generally likes stock buybacks because they give a boost to one of analysts’ and investors’ favorite numbers,profits expressed on a per share basis.
The company had roughly $260 million in cash at the end of 2008.
Quest,typically a very acquisitive company,has slowed down its buying in the past few months.
In January, Quest bought Redwood City-based Monosphere Inc., a small maker of software that manages data storage networks, for undisclosed terms.
It bought Phoenix-based NetPro Computing Inc. for $78 million in cash back in September.
Quest makes software that customizes and boosts the performance of databases and other applications made by Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. among others.
The company’s shares are off 19% in the past 12 months on a recent market value of about $1 billion.
