The Scotts Valley, California-based software company Borland International Inc, whose shares are traded on the London Unlisted Securities Market declared that its prospects were bright despite an end of year net loss of $2.3m. The company’s optimism is founded on the fact that the comparable fourth quarter figure for 1988 of $5.5m was derived from the shipment of a lot of new products constituting an unsustainable peak in the company’s fortunes. The past year’s performance was further handicapped, according to Borland’s president Philippe Kahn, by restructuring costs of approximately $3m. So now the restructuring has been completed with the company’s number of employees being cut by 30% to 492, and with expenses reduced by $1m per month, can we expect a return to overall profitability by the end of this financial year? Kahn’s reply was hesitant as he said that there would be no back-to-back profitablity rise in the next quarter, and that there were no major product introductions to come. Instead Borland is building its future on developing its markets in the word processing, spreadsheet, database and Turbo language markets. While Borland’s word processing package Sprint is having trouble penetrating the market, the company has a noteworthy marketing achievement in Japan where it claims that its Turbo C is the number-one selling C compiler. Indeed, the company has recently opened an office in Tokyo where it is adapting its products to the Japanese NEC Corp PC9801 standards, and says that it will have a version of Paradox in Japanese by the end of the year. At present Turbo languages account for 42% of revenue, with 58% coming mainly from the Paradox and Quattro business products. In particular Borland is looking to corporate companies standardising on Paradox 3.0 in the Fortune 1,000 market to provide steady future growth. In this vein it is proud of its partnership with IBM, especially with the UK venture whereby IBM UK has agreed to distribute Paradox for OS/2. Kahn, at any rate, seems confident that Borland has a future as an independent company as he said that Lotus Development Corp and Ashton-Tate Corp have peaked leaving Borland a growing market share with its Quattro and Paradox products. He stated quite firmly that the company did not need the alliance of a big brother. In buyout terms this may be true, but the more marketing agreements with companies like IBM Borland has under its belt the solider its future will look. Borland shares took the figures in their stride, putting on tuppence ha’penny to 82.5 pence.
