Tadpole Technology Inc is not out of the woods yet, but the UK computer manufacturer is looking slightly healthier and will draw on its relationship with Sun Microsystems Inc to aid its return to profitability. The Cambridge company has announced a fall in losses for the year to September 30 at 2.6m pounds from 4.0m pounds at the same time last year, while revenue fell 44.2% to 13.4m pounds. The drop in revenue is being attributed to the axing of all of Tadpole personal computer interests and some old board contracts. The company closed its Paris office and moved offices to a cheaper site in Cambridge in a bid to cut costs, which has worked according to chief executive Bernard Hulme. Tadpole managed to reduce costs between the first half and the second half of the year by 60%. The way ahead now for Tadpole lies with the mobile and Java markets. At the moment the majority of the company’s revenue is generated from its SPARCbook line of workstations, and Hulme plans to introduce new mobile models with Solaris in the first half of the year to complement the existing line of products. In July Tadpole took the wraps off of the SPARCbook 3000 (CI No 3,205), which according to Hulme is going okay but, it won’t set the world on fire. The second half of the year will see the introduction of mobile Java-based devices, which Hulme describes as a mobile intranet. Tadpole will target these devices at the utilities markets in both the UK and the US. Hulme believes he has identified a market that has had increasing pressure placed upon it to perform better and better all the time. The new Tadpole devices will contain mobile mapping capabilities, among other things designed to be used by field engineers in the utilities space. There is no doubt about it that the now 90-person operation – two years ago that figure stood at 160 – is getting closer to Sun. But Hulme doesn’t see Tadpole as an acquisition target and says the companies have an open relationship and Tadpole will not move into the same space as Sun. This time next year Hulme hopes his figures will tell a different story and is confident that a return to profitability is imminent.
