Telemetrix Plc, headquartered in the West Country town of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, has been through some financial battles in its time. After going public in mid-1986 it sustained losses until the middle of 1988 when the South African white knight, Altron, Allied Electronics Corp Pty Ltd, came along. Its problem, to put it mildly, was a lack of focus. Says Roy Cotterill, who joined the group as chairman in 1986, shortly after it went public, if I’d bought the company rather than joining it I would never have jumped. When he arrived, the group owed UKP3m and he felt he had three options: to break the business up, sell it off and pay the shareholders, to turn it into a much smaller business, or to seek a partner. He rapidly sold off the Isoplastics, NC Riter, Lord Medical, Micromos, Telegraphix and Telemetrix Research and Software businesses retaining the Westward terminal business which had been the core of Telemetrix. At this point Cotterill takes a deep breath – he is about to explain why he took the contentious and unfashionable step of taking on board a South African partner.

Johannesburg

The company in question, Altron, controls around 60% of the market capitalisation on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and, in order to expand, it required a majority stake in an overseas company. Cotterill hastens to add that he would never have allied himself with an immoral organisation but said that he was happy with the way that Altron conducted its business in South Africa. It has adopted an Oppenheimer attitude to its operations there – that is it insists upon fair promotion prospects for black employees so that, pace apartheid, blacks can be in charge of white employees. Altron is a billion dollar company. Its holding company Ventron is 50% owned by Anglo American and Altron itself which employs 16,000 people has three main businesses: a telecommunications company, Altech, which controls the old STC agencies, a cabling company Powertech and a computer and financial services arm, Fintech. All of Altron’s overseas interests including the US components manufacturer GTI now come under the Telemetrix name. Roy Cotterill came to Telemetrix having spent 28 years at GEC Plc as an engineer working overseas. He started off in the West Indies and worked his way through management positions, ending up as the chairman and managing director of the GEC companies in Australia. He says he wouldn’t describe himself as a particularly technical person, since he was a general engineer, tackling a wide range of product areas. During his career he appears to have been influenced by Lord Weinstock, his managing director at GEC, and says that he applied the Weinstock philosophy to Telemetrix when he arrived. –

By Katy Ring

He made cut-backs, collected in the debts, controlled the stock and took a tight rein. He also spent several months talking about policy with Altron. The South African company had been very successful with components in the past and wanted to build the Telemetrix business up from such a base. So the group bought a small electronics company, Component Trading, which exported about UKP3m worth of components to South Africa. It also acquired the US GTI operation from Altron. This business mostly manufactures flexible printed circuit boards and its sales are concentrated in the automobile industry. At the moment this means that it is having an awkward time since cars aren’t moving as fast as they used to; however GTI has contracts with both US and Japanese companies and will be pulled uphill when the industry turns again. GTI also provides companies such as ITT and Thomson with 6,000m leads a year and has recently taken over the franchise for Cornings low temperature glass equipment which has good profit margins. All the GTI businesses are cash generators but they tend to be unexciting and Cotterill would like to see them exploring more exciting components avenues via acquisitions. In the UK Zetex was bought from Plessey Semiconductors largely because the engineers at Zetex were attempting a management buyout but lacked ent

repreneurial skills, so Telemetrix stepped in, since Cotterill was impressed with the management’s desire to get the business going. As for getting the data communications side of Telemetrix up and running, Cotterill admits there have been difficulties because in the acquisitions market for this sector when a deal is on the table some mug always comes along and offers loads more money. However, perhaps because Trend was being troubled by a declining telex market, Telemetrix managed to bag it. Now the Trend companies are no longer so reliant on British Telecom’s custom and are doing well. Datalink, which was built up from scratch in 1987, designs, installs and maintains private networks and Cotterill is particularly enthusiastic about its test businesses which are being combined into one operation and will be expanded. Trend Telecommunications has a healthy Tempesting business which safeguards electronic equipment from eavesdropping and supplies such products to NATO armed forces.

Tewkesbury

Finally there is Telemetrix’ graphics operation, which incorporates the original Westward Micro business. Cotterill has grown the division by buying several companies. The jewel amongst these is the Norwegian company Rasterex International which has a hot line in graphics cards – in one week last month its sales were slightly larger than the total price Telemetrix paid for the company. All the Rasterex products are manufactured in Tewkesbury. The UK Rasterex distributor Expert Graphics was acquired to secure Rasterex’s UK distribution channel. The other company that has recently been acquired is Digivision which operates at very high margins. It manufactures displays for the financial markets turning over about UKP100,000 per month. As for Westward, Cotterill believes that it will be the last of the host-based terminal manufacturers in the UK and while he doesn’t expect its business to grow, neither does he expect it to decline very rapidly. Westward’s latest product is a diskless terminal which will be formally unveiled at the Which Computer? Show. Cotterill is looking for an even split between the components, telecommunications and graphics businesses. At present GTI is the largest business, with Trend coming up fast behind it, and graphics is now the smallest unit.