London-based Eidos Plc is a small fish in a rapidly flooding pond – its speciality is software-only video compression – which it uses in its offline video-editing software. Half year losses of UKP78,254 indicate that life has not been easy for the company – its software runs on Acorn Computers Plc’s RISC-based A500 and A5000 family, but is aimed at the professional broadcaster. Floated in 1990, it now needs more money and hopes to raise UKP86,250 by issuing 115,000 new ordinary shares to managing director Charles Cornwall at 75 pence a piece. At the annual general meeting in March, the company decided to change tack and place the emphasis on developing a generic version of its proprietary video compression software for incorporation in third parties’ products. The company says that this is already beginning to pay off; the chairman’s statement says that though sales of Optima and Compressor (its editing and compression products) have improved somewhat during the second half of the year the bulk of revenue has come feasibility studies that Eidos has carried out for several substantial private and quoted entities who want to incorporate the company’s core ESCaPE software into their own products. Eidos believes that applications will arise in the area of telecommunications and security and on July 14 it signed a worldwide marketing agreement with another London start-up called Enabling Technologies Ltd, which specialises in finding customers and capital for young computer businesses. Eidos itself is not relying on it for cash, but nonetheless believes that it needs the new share issue to capitalise on the opportunities. This issue will be subject to approval from an forthcoming extraordinary general meeting.
