Last year’s listing on London’s Alternative Investment Market seems to have given Israeli systems house Dmatek Ltd the visibility it was looking for to send revenue soaring and reduce its early losses. The developer of automatic color defect detection systems for printing, and electronic tagging technology (CI No 2,802), turned in losses down at $2.2m from last year’s $3.5m on revenue that rose 611% to $5.6m. The company has two operating subsidiaries, Elmo-Tech Ltd which handles the electronic monitoring and tagging business, and AVT Ltd which deals with the print systems. AVT’s PrintVision/9000 product uses an optical scanner to scan a large print run, such as a newspaper run, for defects, and displays the errors on a computer screen to enable an operator to correct them on the fly. The company says it has sold and installed systems in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain during the year, with customers including newspapers, wallpaper printers and a packaging company. In total, it sold 24 systems in the year, 15 of which came through as actual sales revenue in the period. As they were so new, Dmatek supplied them on a sale or return basis, and says only one customer actually returned a system. AVT has a current order book of more than $1m. Elmo-Tech has continued to focus the initial marketing of its electronic tagging systems on law enforcement agencies, and says the highlight of the year was the completion of a full contract for the Swedish Prison and Probation Service, which brought in $2.7m revenue in the year, with extra sales likely. The Swedish goverment is apparently planning to close seven prisons on the back of having the system, which enables house arrest criminals to be monitored. In the US, the company has an OEM agreement with Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc, and one with GSSC Inc a supplier of prison systems. The company says other countries do not yet have the legislation that will allow house arrest prisoners, but it believes this will change shortly in the UK at least. Dmatek says both its technologies are aimed at emerging markets, which gives it the opportunity to become a market leader, and poses the challenge of selling to an uneducated market. It believes that as it gets more reference sites for both products, the sale will be easier and the sales cycle shorter.
