Siemens to acquire UGS Corp
New York: Siemens AG has agreed to buy industrial design software maker UGS Corp. for $3.5 billion and will sell shares in automotive engineering unit VDO.

Siemens said it planned an initial public offering of VDO, which had annual sales of 10 billion euros ($13 billion) in the last fiscal year and would hold a majority stake in VDO though the size of the stake was not revealed.

The company said the purchase of UGS would add industrial software for planning, design and simulation to the automation-technology portfolio of its factory-automation unit, A&D.

Texas-based UGS is owned by three private equity firms -- Bain Capital, Silver Lake Partners and Warburg Pincus, which bought UGS from technology services provider Electronic Data Systems in March 2004 for $2.05 billion.

UGS sells software that manufacturers use to design complex products such as airplanes, automobiles and military systems. It had revenues of $1.15 billion in 2005.
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eBay Q4 net up 24 pc
San Francisco: eBay Inc.'s quarterly net profit rose 24 percent on strong international revenue growth, and the company has given a strong guidance for 2007 saying earnings would be at the high end of analysts' forecasts.

Shares in the company rose more than 12 percent in after hours trading, and investors took eBay's results as a sign of strength in its main auction business and its forecasts as a good sign for revenue growth.

EBay's fourth-quarter net income rose to $346.5 million, or 25 cents a share, from the year-earlier quarter's net income of $279.2 million, or 20 cents a diluted share.

Excluding one-time items, net income rose 27 percent to $431 million, or 31 cents per share.
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China to overtake US in netizen numbers
Beijing: Netizen numbers in China rose to 23.4 pc in 2006 to touch 137 million and may overtake the netizen numbers in the United States within two years.

The number of internet users rose to 137 million last year, up 23.4 pc to comprise 10.5 pc of the country's population of 1.3 billion, the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) said in a report.

Officials said in two years China would overtake the US in netizen numbers. The US now has about 210 million internet users, according to industry estimates.
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