Akamai Technologies
(AKAM) recently announced that Malaysia Airlines has selected Akamai to power its main website and the airline’s booking engine, in order to provide customers with a faster website experience.

Akamai applied its Web Application Accelerator solution, which increased the website’s performance by 50% and, ultimately, increased online booking by more than 30%. Malaysia Airlines is realizing benefits from this process, which is ultimately enhancing its competitive advantage.

Worldwide, the Commercial Airlines industry is in the doldrums, and this new application from Akamai has the capability to boost online sales. We believe this new offering from Akamai will be accepted and applied by major players in the Airlines industry, as the industry is in dire need to boost sales.

Akamai’s Web Application Accelerator solution delivers website performance approximately 5x faster than the original Web infrastructure and handles the specific requirements of dynamically-generated content, without any specific hardware, and without unnecessarily taxing the company’s resources. The company provides customers with 48,000 secure servers deployed in 70 countries and equipped with specialized software to handle major Internet traffic. This unveils a good business opportunity, which may become a major revenue earner for the company.

We believe pricing will be an issue in this case, so Akamai has to make the pricing really sweet to win new customers and generate volume. On the flip side, we believe that as AKAM serves consumer-focused companies, it is more sensitive to consumer spending compared to the rest of the IT space. Akamai is facing growing competition and pricing pressure as new competitors enter the market. We maintain a Hold rating on the stock.

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