Arcontech misses sales target

12th Sep 2011 07:03

Arcontech, which provides products and services for real-time financial market data processing and trading, said sales for the year had failed to reach their target. Revenue grew from £1m to £1.28m in the year to end-June, but high administrative costs caused a pre-tax loss of £0.8m (2010: -£0.9m). Loss per share narrowed to 0.04p from 0.07p. Chairman Richard Last said: "We did not quite achieve the level of sales we had hoped for, due primarily to the increasingly long sales cycles of the major investment banks. We have decided to concentrate sales resources on our CityVision products."The decision to concentrate on CityVision came after the company saw less demand than expected for AXE, its retail trading system product."With the CityVision product developments completed since the year-end, we believe we are in a positive position to start to realise the sales opportunities identified previously for those products. Sales made since the year end for new products with international financial institutions, reinforce our belief that there is strong demand for our products in the market," Last added.Customers are keeping a tight hold on costs, prompting the group to develop new products and re-engineer existing ones to "provide compelling value propositions". Customer sales cycles continue to be long and it remains difficult to predict the precise timing of future sales, so Arcontech is emulating many of its customers and watching the pennies, "whilst continuing to develop opportunities for the business."The group saw a reduction in cash from £1.58m to £0.8m and said, "we believe the group has sufficient resources to see it through to cash break-even at the trading level and beyond."NR