Orders received by UK-financial and helpdesk software company, Royalblue Group Plc in the first half of the current year are comfortably ahead of last year and provide little evidence of any slowdown in customer expenditure due to the Y2K issue. However chief executive John Hamer says that although many organizations will delay putting systems live around the millennium, much investment will continue in parallel on systems to be rolled out in 2000. Overall, Hamer reckons that although the uncertainties associated with Y2K are hard to quantify, growth opportunities in the company’s markets remain.
Hamer’s comments came after the Woking, Surrey-based company, reported a 51% increase in net profits to 1.7m pounds ($2.7m) in the six months to June 30 on revenue that increased 34.5% to 17.9m pounds ($28.4m). Net earnings per share rose 48.6% to 5.5 pence.
But the company saw a 150% increase in overseas sales in the first six months, so that revenue outside the UK now amounts to 30% of the total. The US has been the most buoyant market where Royalblue has benefited from the growing volume of securities traded on electronic communications networks (ECNs). Now the company is looking to tap the potential of Asia with some of its US and UK customers implementing its software in Hong Kong and it says it has signed a deal with a Japanese bank to trade equities.
Royalblue also plans to introduce its Fidessa financial trading software as an application service provider in the US market. An internet gateway is being developed for customers that want to offer e-commerce services so their clients can enter their own orders through a browser front-end.
