Holding true to the promise it made last summer, Pegasus Group Plc has expanded its product range by buying QDC Systems Ltd, maker of a manufacturing software product called Operations. Kettering, Northamptonshire-based Pegasus is paying ú400,853 cash now and will make deferred payments of up to ú800,000 by December 31 1997. The deferred consideration takes the form of a defined share of the profits from the QDC business which will be a new division of Pegasus, the Operations Division, over each of the next three years. Payment is conditional on it meeting specified targets in each of those three years and in total over the period. The business Pegasus is buying consists of the intellectual property rights to Operations, and some QDC assets, as well as the whole of the goodwill in the QDC business. In QDC’s latest audited annual accounts, it reported profits before tax for the year to January 31 1994 of ú20,271 and net assets of ú15,319. Operations has been on the market for three years. The plan now is to link Operations to Pegasus’s accounting software and to market the integrated product, via Pegasus’ dealership network, to end users in the broad manufacturing and assembly sector. The developers of Operations, Christopher Scrivener, Steven Power and Malcolm Robinson, plus a support technician, Paul Martin, join Pegasus Software Ltd on three-year contracts and during that time they will further develop and support the software and work on the integration with Opera. They will also assist in the marketing and sale of Operations as an integrated or stand-alone product.
