The secret of putting the best gloss possible on your results is to choose carefully what you compare them with. Gresham Telecomputing Plc would like us to compare its interim results not with the first half of last year but against the second, or most recent half. Indeed, if you compare the six months to April 30 1994 with the first half of last year, pre-tax profits fall a whopping 41.8% to ?244,000 on turnover flat at ?3.1m. But against the second half of last year, the first half to follow the group’s restructuring, pre-tax jumped 84.8% on turnover up 11.0%. Such are the joys of numbers! Of the results just published, reorganisation costs shaved a further ?53,000 off operating profits, but chairman Hamish Donaldson is confident that these will be recovered in the remainder of this year through reduced costs, and benefits will accrue over years to come. Interwork Ltd, bought in January with the issue of 700,000 new shares and the option for a further 400,000 shares, contributed ?37,000 to operating profits on turnover of ?144,000. Ex-Interwork directors Christopher Swinbank and Christopher Howe-Davies were appointed as Gresham’s managing director and sales director respectively, and a new organisational structure was set in place from April. The group hopes to manage and expand revenue streams more effectively and focus its sales strategy. Donaldson feels that early forecasts predicting a mass exodus of users to open systems have been over-optimistic. People are not rushing to hurl their mainframes from windows, as they see too great a risk in abandoning well-tried proprietary hardware for fragmented open systems. High publicity for those that have tried and failed has done little to encourage this particular leap of faith for the sake of saving money. Donaldson sees the real incentive for change arising with the demand for greater functionality, typically a consequence of business process re-engineering. Gresham is finding that such opportunities mean the addition of complementary new open systems and personal computer applications rather than the replacement of mainframes. Gresham has outlined three markets for its products: traditional mainframe utility products; transaction processing and utility products for open systems; and interworking products to operate between mainframes, open systems and personal computer. Gresham has seen an upturn in its mainframe utilities sales, and plans to expand to cover open systems. Dun & Bradstreet Software Inc has taken 30 orders for tp+ this year, and Gresham is at present creating standard interworking utilities for its DataServe range. As in previous years it has proposed no interim dividend.
