Newport Beach video game developer Foundation 9 Entertainment Inc. said last week it plans to split off one of its Canadian studios.
The studio, in the tiny province of Prince Edward Island, was started a year ago as part of privately held Foundation 9. It used to be known as Backbone Charlottetown. (The latter part of the name stems from Prince Edward Island’s capital. The former comes from Foundation 9 precursor Backbone Enter-tainment of Northern California.)
The company now has been renamed Other Ocean Interactive Ltd.
Terms of the deal, expected to wrap up this month, weren’t disclosed.
Foundation 9 cofounder Andrew Ayre, a Canadian, plans to head Other Ocean and be a primary stakeholder.
“I’m looking forward to growing game development in Atlantic Canada and further establishing the region as an up-and-coming location where top games are produced,” Ayre said in a statement.
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Atlantic Technology Centre: Other Ocean’s Home |
Prince Edward Island,a 2,000-plus-mile island off Nova Scotia with about 135,000 people,is better known as the setting of “Anne of Green Gables” than video games.
But Other Ocean is playing up its location.
“We are very proud of our digs in the penthouse suite of the Atlantic Technology Centre,” a building outfitted for interactive media companies, the company said on its Web site.
“The building is state of the art and our enormous deck overlooking a city oozing with history lets us take in the clean fresh air of Canada’s East Coast.”
Other Ocean recently came out with a game called “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night” for Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox Live Arcade.
It’s developing a remake of “Tron” and “Discs of Tron” games based on Walt Disney Co.’s 1982 sci-fi movie.
The split marks a departure for Foundation 9, which has been snatching up smaller game makers in the past year as part of consolidation in the games business.
Foundation 9 doesn’t plan to keep a stake in Other Ocean, according to the company.
“We have recognized the need to focus on larger studios, both our current ones and potential future additions to the company,” Foundation 9 Chief Executive Jon Goldman said.
Two acquisitions, Shiny Entertainment Studios of Laguna Beach and Newport Beach’s Collective Inc., were combined into Foundation 9’s new Irvine headquarters a few months ago.
Foundation 9 is the result of another deal in early 2005, when Newport Beach-based game developer Collective combined with Backbone Entertainment of Emeryville.
Staying in Ireland
Microsemi Corp., the Irvine maker of chips that power satellites, military aircraft, medical equipment and other things, has opted not to close an Ireland plant previously marked for job cuts.
The company decided to keep open its plant in Ennis, in western Ireland, to meet demand from its defense and aerospace customers, Microsemi said in a recent government filing.
Defense and aerospace makes up about half of Microsemi’s $370 million in yearly sales. The Ennis plant now generates less than 5% of Microsemi’s yearly sales. It spans 62,500 square feet and has about 60 workers.
Earlier, Microsemi said it planned to close the Irish plant as part of a three-phase cost cutting program.
MTI Delising
Irvine’s MTI Technology Corp., a seller of data storage computers, got the boot from Nasdaq at the start of June.
Nasdaq’s listing qualifications panel found that the company failed to meet the minimum market value of $35 million to trade on the exchange.
MTI’s shares also have failed to trade above the required $1 a share minimum.
The company’s shares now trade on Pink Sheets, an over-the-counter exchange.
MTI received a series of warning letters from Nasdaq in the past six months so.
Some of MTI’s customers include Microsoft Corp., Symantec Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc.
Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp. has a 25% stake in MTI, which was at one time a competitor.
Taking Inventory
Some OC chipmakers are doing better than others in managing supplies of unsold chips during a time of big oversupply, according to report investor Web site SeekingAlpha.
The higher the inventory, the more likely the company will need to reduce prices, cut production or take a write-off, all of which would reduce profits, according to the report.
The five chipmakers with the best inventory management, or lowest stockpiles on hand relative to sales: No. 1 Chandler, Ariz.-based Amkor Technology Inc., No. 2 St. Peters, Mo.-based MEMC Electronic Materials Inc., No. 3 San Jose’s Sirf Technology Holdings Inc., No. 4 Irvine-based Broadcom Corp. and No. 5 FormFactor Inc. of Livermore.
The five chipmakers with the worst inventory management, or the highest stocks on hand relative to sales: No. 1 Hauppauge, N.Y.-based Standard Microsystems Corp., No. 2 Mountain View’s NetLogic Microsystems Inc., No. 3 Microchip Technology Inc. of Chandler, Ariz., No. 4 Austin, Texas-based Cirrus Logic Inc. and No. 5 Irvine’s Microsemi.
