After a shortlived flurry in 1989, when the then National Coal Board entered negotiations to sell its Compower Ltd bureau and computer services business, and then decided to keep it, and to give it a higher profile (CI No 1,223), all has been quiet on the Compower front, but now the Cannock, Staffordshire business really is for sale. The successor British Coal Corporation is looking for a buyer for Compower, and also wants to outsource all its own data processing – and while it would like the buyer of the bureau and the facilities manager to be one and the same, it says it is prepared to consider separate bids for the bureau and responses to the facilities management tender. Compower, which was doing ?7m annually on some fairly venerable top-end IBM Corp mainframes in 1989, has now grown the business to ?8.7m, on which it made audited pre-tax profits of ?900,000 but those figures are a little out of date because they are for the year to March 1993. The business includes payroll processing and personnel management, electronic funds transfer, point of sale services, and some accounts processing. It also offers an Electronic Data Interchange that runs under MS-DOS. Anyone likely to be interested no doubt knows about the sale and tender already, but expressions of interest must be in by May 18; Samuel Montagu & Co Ltd is assisting.
Content from our partners
