Telecomputing Plc is moving away from the loss-making expert system company it had become under Bernard Panton’s leadership and is currently trading profitably. Unfortunately these changes happened after September 30 when its financial year for 1989 ended and so it has reported pre-tax losses of UKP777,000 on turnover down by 19% to UKP2.5m. Telecomputing’s problems came to light when Ferrari Holdings acquired a 30% stake in the company in November (CI No 1,304) and discovered that the company had been capitalising its research and development costs instead of subtracting them from its profits. This practice has now stopped, but explains Telecomputing’s loss for 1989 as well as its restated 1988 figures which also show a loss. As revealed last month (CI No 1,367) the new board of directors at Telecomputing, headed by Mike Whitaker of Singer & Friedlander, is moving away from its dependency on the Top-One artificial intelligence product and concentrating on the traditional TPS teleprocessing monitor business. Top-One has now been sold to a number of its institutional users and Telecomputing has stopped funding the associated development company Merrion Gated Software BV. However, expert system development in areas with proven commercial value such as Cobol conversion, mainframe batch job scheduling, pensions management and micro-to-mainframe links will continue. Nevertheless, Whitaker places more faith in the revenue earning potential of the TPS product and says Telecomputing will extend it into the Unix world. The board is to raise UKP500,000 to eliminate borrowings by placing 1.6m ordinary shares. The shares are priced at 37 pence each, and existing shareholders can apply for them on a 1 for 3 basis. Telecomputing will need the broader capital base to pursue its intended acquisition policy in vertical software markets such as computer-aided design, manufacturing and finance.
