ICM rejected our approach and announced competing interest, but no offer for ICM has yet been announced and ICM remains in an offer period, it said. The Netstore board awaits further developments and will continue to consider its options.
Earlier this week ICM reported that, while it had received approaches from Phoenix IT Group and a management-backed consortium since rejecting Netstore in December, no formal offers had been made. The company added that the process of dealing with such approaches had consumed considerable management time over the last five months, [and had] delayed the completion of the strategic plan set out at the end of the last financial year.
Netstore’s statement came as the company reported a narrow profit for the first half of its current fiscal year. In the six months to the end of December 2006, the company made a net profit of 8,000 pounds ($15,500), compared to a loss of 1.4m pounds ($2.7m) in the same period of the previous year, on revenue that grew 24.4% to 20.1m pounds ($38.8m).
