Microvitec Plc, the Bradford, West Yorkshire supplier of displays, networking products and software has seen a 96.5% jump in its half-year pre-tax profits, to UKP1.1m, on turnover up 16.5% at UKP20.9m. The company had the largest growth in its Display Systems Division, with turnover up 39%, after major orders for its Series 13 colour monitors from Acorn Computers Plc for its personal computer range and Electrohome of Canada. According to Tony Sampson, financial director, the division that had 66% of Microvitec’s turnover has a good product mix, supplying monitors to British Telecommunications Plc, Reuters Plc and Bloomberg Business News, hospitals and bank trading rooms. The Networking Division, 25% of the company, enjoyed a 17% growth in turnover in the half and its Silcom manufacturing arm, had a warm reception in the Token Ring transceiver market place for its new range of repeaters, adaptor cards and Multiple Access Units. Turnover in the Software Systems Division, the remaining 9% of the company, grew by 14%. The company’s Multimedia division has launched the RICK card – Real Time Image Compression – that compresses and decompresses still images, and the Movie Media Card – MPEG 1 standard – decoding video and audio from storage media such as compact disks, and according to the company, both have attracted considerable interest. In time, Sampson expects the multimedia divsion to become autonomous, although he sees a great deal of synergy with the company’s dominant display business. As before, Microvitec will pay no dividend.
