Calluna Plc, the perennially struggling Glenrothes, Scotland, designer of microdisks, has decided to beef up its consumer offerings by rebranding its 260MB Type II PC Card hard drive as ‘moveit’. The name is designed to reflect what the company sees as the virtue of the product, a 5mm thick credit card-sized device that consumers can tuck into their wallet as they transfer data from laptop or PDAs onto PCs or Macs. The company sees new markets transferring data from still digital or video cameras onto other devices.
With a retail price of 179 pounds ($293), Calluna sees growing opportunities in the retail market to add to its OEM deals and sales through distribution channels provided by companies such as Tech Data. Calluna, which posted a pre-tax loss of 3.2m pounds ($5.1m) on revenue of 24.6m pounds ($39.2m) in its last financial year (CI No 3,685), has always found it difficult to translate its technical expertise into financial success. A push into potentially high-margin retail markets could help the bottom line though with the shares languishing at 13.75 pence, markets remain skeptical about Calluna’s ability to turn itself into a money-maker.
