Triad - worthy of a survivors award?

(By Anthony Miller – Tuesday 16th June 2009 8:15am). I was just leafing through the Year 2000 Holway Report to remind myself of how we saw the fortunes and prospects of traditional ‘system house’ and ITSA, Triad Group back then. We had just stripped them of their Holway Boring Award after they warned that EPS was going backwards. For the year ended 31st March 1999, Triad recorded £8.6m PBT on £49.3m in revenues.

Those were, in hindsight, the good days. A decade later, Triad has just reported a small pre-tax loss against £33m in revenues (see here). But at least they returned to a small operating profit (£165k) though this should be read in the context of £362k in software R&D capitalisation for their fledgling ‘location intelligence’ product, Zubed.

Triad has had, to say the least, a colourful history, but is clearly a survivor. It’s obviously no longer worth the £34m valuation accorded to its 1996 IPO on London’s main market at 135p a share – today it's more like £15m at 32p a share. So may be the move into packaged software is an attempt to boost the valuation, who knows. There was no information given on Zubed sales so it’s hard to take a view.

Back in 2000 we said that “it’s hard to see how firms like Triad and (the now late) MMT can justify their independence ...” So maybe Triad at least deserves a TechMarketView Survivor’s Award as so many ‘stars of the 90’s’ just like them never made it this far!