Borland International Inc, the Scotts Valley, California software supplier, has finally announced its figures for the year to March 31, and they were even worse than expected. Net losses for the fourth quarter totalled $76.0m, on turnover of $51.0m, bringing losses for the year to $69.9m, as revenue fell 15.2% to $393.5m on last year. […]
Borland International Inc, the Scotts Valley, California software supplier, has finally announced its figures for the year to March 31, and they were even worse than expected. Net losses for the fourth quarter totalled $76.0m, on turnover of $51.0m, bringing losses for the year to $69.9m, as revenue fell 15.2% to $393.5m on last year. The company has also amended its third quarter results, to reflect marketing commitments of $3.3m, which had previously omitted. For Philippe Kahn, irrepressible chairman, president, and chief executive, the figures were as expected, and reflected two transition quarters where the company had been rethinking, reinventing, restructuring and re-engineering the company to focus on the core upsizing business line of tools, languages and databases it’s painful, but nothing is easy. He is confident of a return to profitability on the back of updated versions of existing products and new product lines – but not this quarter. The company believes that the losses can be at least partially explained by delayed purchasing decisions, as customers awaited new versions and products, market uncertainty following the proposed sale of Quattro Pro, and disruptions caused by the continuing restructuring. In its core business of languages, Borland has recently announced an agreement with Novell Inc to build cross-system C++ development tools and applications frameworks together with AppWare. The company is also currently developing several next generation visual development tools, which have Object Pascal as their underlying language. This marks a direct assault on a market that Microsoft Corp’s Visual Basic has made its own, and if the Borland product, which will be available in six months time, can incorporate Custom Controls and support Visual Basic Custom Controls, then Borland may have found a winner. Borland also dwelt on its new range of ‘Simplify’ products, to include SideKick for Windows. Simplify is slimware, one-disk software, a backlash against fatware, offering limited functions at a low cost. SideKick for Windows went into duplication last week and will be available within two weeks. Aimed at the consumer market, it will complement Hewlett-Packard Co’s Dashboard range. Borland has no plans to offer the range on the Macintosh, but is investigating palm-top computers for the future. Responding to an article in the Wall Street Journal, which criticised Kahn’s management of Borland, Keith Maib, chief operating officer, dismissed any attempts to remove Kahn from the helm: we as a management team are all absolutely committed to Borland, as a company, and to Philippe as founder and visionary, he insisted.
