Discontinued operations this year and an exceptional profit item last year combine to make Gresham Telecomputing Plc’s figures rather bleaker than they otherwise would be. Back in September the company discontinued its Itec second hand hardware broking business, thus losing UKP1.5m in turnover. Turnover on continuing operations, were essentially flat. On the profit side, last year saw an exceptional profit of UKP236,000 as the company capitalised software purchases previously written off, and corrected an over-provision for expected costs from the Gresham-Telecomputing merger. Excluding this, pre-tax profit rose by 3.7%. This small increase has been achieved, says Hamish Donaldson, despite an unspecified increase in research and development expenditure. Donaldson has taken over as chairman from Sid Green since last year, and is not the only new face. Chris Swinbank and Chris Howe-Davis joined around four weeks ago managing director and sales director respectively. Both are old Telecomputing hands, and were part of the company that originally sold Telecomputing the open TP+ transaction processing software on which Gresham is pinning its bets. Proprietary ICL software sales still contribute the majority of Gresham’s sales, though Swinbank says that the graphs are converging
