IMC Ltd, the imaging hardware distribution company, has paid off its loan to sister software firm Riva Ltd through an undisclosed share issue designed to bring the firms together. Managing director and total shareholder of both firms David Robson diluted his holding in larger firm IMC, to pay back a loan by Riva to IMC after he bought the latter from the recievers in 1988. The combination will create a group with 13 staff, doing UKP2m annual turnover, UKP1.5m from IMC, UKP500,000 from Riva. Some IMC directors will buy shares in IMC, and to improve economies of scale Riva’s administration operations in Bentley, Hampshire, will be transferred to IMC’s Windsor-based offices. Riva’s old site, which is leased, will be maintained for storage, sales and services. Robson will merge the two imaging businesses with no redundancies to make a single business able to provide customers with a single imaging system. Riva Ltd, which started in the early 1980s in terminal distribution, progressed to software and hardware distribution and now distributes ImagePals, an image storage and manipulation database. IMC, which started in 1988, and was bought by Robson from the receivers in 1989, distributes image input and output peripherals including colour flatbed scanners from UMAX, film recorders from Lasergraphics and colour printers. It also sells a high-end Macintosh-based image manipulation system called Archis. It has a colour output bureau that puts images onto the uncommon CD-ROM XA format. The bureau will form 10% of the company’s business, with 10% to 20% of business coming from Riva.
