The history of the last surviving stand-alone British minicomputer company, ITL Information Technology Plc made it clear that its career as a public company was never going to be a serene one – it frequently lost money in its first half as a private company – and so it is proving: the shares are down at 41 pence against a placing price of 109 pence after the Hemel Hempstead company warned that while orders were up, sales are lower than expected in the first half to October 16 because not enough orders could be completed in time; things are clearly rather worse than that sounds, because the company is cutting its workforce by 43 people, 8%, as margins come under pressure in the move from its own proprietary computers over to Unix systems.
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