By William Fellows
With NCR Corp CFO David Bearman calling for fourth quarter revenues to be up year-over-year for the first time since 1995, NCR’s business could be ready to head north again after nearly a decade of woe. The company admits there are some marketing challenges it could better execute but says that if the likes of Unisys Corp can stage a recovery, then it doesn’t see any reason why NCR shouldn’t also experience a renaissance. While brokerage Merrill Lynch & Co is advising investors to accumulate NCR shares, the stock remains a second tier player. The brokerage believes that NCR faces two important marketing challenges. The first to create a theme to a company with three businesses: computers, ATMs, retail terminals; and second, to increase mindshare in computers. It doesn’t believe the three businesses currently enjoy a lot of synergy. The idea, it says should be to capture transactions with ATMs and POS terminals then analyze the data with datawarehousing tools. Moreover the brokerage thinks NCR should be getting more out of its datawarehousing business, which is now the focus of its computer organization: although it’s only 15% of revenue, datawarehousing will probably drive half the stock valuation from a perception standpoint. It would also like to see NCR branding data warehouse systems as Teradata first and NCR second. It is already using a boilerplate for its ads which reads transforming transactions into relationships. Meantime, as it buys back the majority of its Japanese subsidiary (CI No 3,393), Merrill notes that NCR is cutting 1,000 of the 3,000 jobs there and will take a $50m charge in its fourth quarter. Any rejuvenation of its business – even taking account of an 18% decline in PC sales over the fourth quarter last year – is taking place against a backdrop of some extensive top level changes at the company which sees Bill Eisenman go back to running NCR’s services business which he previously ran under the unproductive tenure of Jerre Stead up to 1995. Eisenman’s appointment follows the departures of Gary Cotshott to Dell Computer Inc to manage Dell’s service providers – NCR is now a Dell service provider. Mark Hurd, previously marketing chief, takes the reins for what NCR now calls the National Accounts Solutions Group as EVP, formerly NCR’s computer operation. He reports to NCR CEO Lars Nyberg and is responsible for research and development, marketing and sales. Dan Harrington, formerly director of datawarehousing is now VP marketing.
