Wordstar International’s French subsidiary Wordstar France SA has gone into receivership after falling out with its parent company, reports 01 Informatique. Back in 1987, Wordstar’s exclusive distributor in France was a company called SND Micropro, which experienced such enormous growth on the back of products like Wordstar Professional, Wordstar 2000 and Easy that by the end of 1989, Wordstar International had taken a 26% stake and renamed it Wordstar France. But the problems started when the San Rafael, California company decided that it wanted the remaining 74% still in the hands of SND Micropro founders that didn’t want to sell. In retaliation for the rebuttal, claims Wordstar France, its parent company stopped supplying the new versions of the software announced in the first quarter of the year. Sales instantly plummeted, and the French firm was forced into liquidation on August 1. Determined to continue its activity in France, Wordstar International made a bid to buy the company back from the receivers, but was rejected by the French law courts, who argued that the crust of bread offered by the American did not take into any account the investments made to establish a distribution network in France. The result, according to Wordstar France, is an impasse, not least because costs of setting up a completely new distribution network in the country appears to be too great. Ever optmistic, Wordstar International’s financial director Jim Dalrymple says nonetheless that the two are still in negotiations.
