The state of Coda Group Plc, the Leeds-based accounting software company, goes from bad to worse. Almost immediately after flotation it made a profits warning and followed this up with an interim pre-tax loss of UKP2.5m in July. This the company partly attributed to an earlier than expected downturn in demand for its Digital Equipment Corp VAX based product. Now Coda has said that sales of its IBM Corp version are also tailing off. These two products represented almost 90% of Coda’s UKP13.4m from new licence sales last year. The company also announced senior management changes and a programme of job cuts to save UKP2m a year. Most redundancies were in the US where the scale of the move to open systems from proprietary took the company by surprise. The move has benefited Coda’s new OAS Open System Client Server product line, and turnover is expected to exceed original budgeted levels, with more than 30 OAS customers by year end. This held little comfort for the markets, and the shares, initially placed at 235 pence in February, shed another 10p to 95 pence.
