Apricot Computers Plc has finally completed the reorganisation that it has been promising for months. This follows the arrival of Mike Hart as deputy managing director. Fresh from Nixdorf UK, he wants to centralise Apricot and increase its number of direct sales to government and industry. Such a move makes sense for a company that always works at a break-even level but has hitherto been stymied from planning its sales by its heavy dependency on dealers and distributors. The inadequacies of this type of loose structure were illustrated last January when a month’s lost production at Apricot’s manufacturing base in Glenrothes led to a UKP6m drop in profits (CI No 1,097). The belated restructuring has led to two resignations from the board: Ed Sherman who headed direct sales and Mike Winn who was in charge of Apricot Financial Systems. The two undoubtedly disliked Hart’s new corporate strategy which questioned their management expertise. For not only has Apricot had far too few direct sales for far too long, but Apricot Financial Systems has viewed itself as a fairly autonomous business to the extent that its actual sales of Apricot hardware has dwindled to 1% – the remaining 99% of Apricot’s financial software being sold on IBM, DEC and Compaq computers. Consequently, Hart intends to bring Financial Systems back into the Apricot orbit and get more of its own hardware sold with Quasar and Citydesk software. Despite this renewed vigour in the direct sales area, however, Apricot does not intend to be in competition with its dealers, but rather will place increasing emphasis on its sales team working as enablers with dealers. Greater stress will, for example, be placed on selling into the Government and big corporates. All this activity is going to cost Apricot about UKP1m – half of which will go in golden handshakes, with the remaining sum being used to bring the new dynamic marketing department together. Opinion in the City believes the restructuring is a good move, but warns that Apricot is likely to find the next couple of years very hard going. But the shares put on a penny at 73p.
