H1 FY17 revenue for EMIS Group, was up 1% compared to the same point last year, reaching £79.2m (H1 FY16: £78.6m), but adjusted operating profit fell 1% to £17.5m (H1 FY16: £17.7m). Recurring revenue now represents 84% of total revenue (up from 81% last year).

EMIS has substantially restructured its business in recent months (see EMIS delivers solid 2016 despite 'NHS headwinds'). Under new CEO Andy Thorburn (see EMIS names new CEO), reorganisation will continue in H2, but will focus more on getting the right skills into the business rather that cutting costs.

On a divisional level, Primary, Community & Acute Care revenue was down 3% to £58.5m (H1 FY16: £60.3m), but adjusted operating profit was up 5%. Within the division, Primary Care continues to hold a strong market share (56%), including more than a quarter of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) now using EMIS Web across all GPs in their region. EMIS also has a strong Child, Community & Mental Health presence in these CCGs. The more problematic area remains Accute Care, where challenging NHS funding has resulted in a reduction in non-recurring implementation work.  

In Community Pharmacy, where EMIS holds 37% market share, revenue was up 5% to £10.9m. Its deal with Celesio UK, announced in March 2016, could see market share reach c.50% by the end of 2018. In Specialist & Care, revenue was up 19% to £8.4m and it has strengthened its position in outsourced diabetic eye screening and ophthalmology imaging services. Revenue from its Patient business was up 42% to £1.4m—it launched the new version of its Patient.info website last month.

It was a solid, if unspectacular, H1. The challenges of operating in the health sector remain, but its recurring revenue gives EMIS a solid foundation to weather ongoing financial headwinds. Its breadth of services across health and care also puts EMIS in a good position to benefit from increasing interest in joined-up care. 

I had an email last night from my friend Mike Phillips (CFO @ Micro Focus) from 34,000 ft on an American Airlines flight to New York to see the NYSE rung by their ‘soon to be’ new CEO, Chris Hsu [who was HPE’s COO part of the merger], ringing the morning bell opening the exchange. [I'll try to get a photo of that for Mondays HotViews or you can see it live on https://www.nyse.com/bell at 9.30 EST]

As Phillips says “Tomorrow [now today!] is the culmination of over 18 months work to dual list and become the largest tech company on the LSE”.

We’ve written many times on the reverse takeover by Micro Focus of the software bits of HPE (incl the ‘old’ Autonomy bits ‘coming home’). Today this will create a company valued at c$8.8b - leap-frogging Sage in valuation and making Micro Focus the most highly valued UK HQed tech (as well as software) group. Micro Focus will in one leap boost its employees from 4500 to 18,500. But I think we can be pretty certain that there will be some job losses post merger. Micro Focus has always been a cost conscious outfit returning much higher margins than many of its peers. It has thrived on the legacy software that others discard. Chairman Kevin Loosemore has never put revenue growth high on his agenda - something that will surely come as a shock to the HPE ‘recruits’.

Readers know my enthusiasm for UK HQed companies so I cannot hide my excitement that Micro Focus will now be the biggest of the lot. I’ve also been a very long-term shareholder. Indeed I bought back in the days Stephen Kelly was CEO - Kelly is now CEO at Sage (now the #2 most highly valued UK tech group) I’ve enjoyed some startling gains. My Micro Focus shares are up 200% since the start of 2014 - and that excludes the generous dividends. But Micro Focus shares have gone sideways in 2017 (up 4.3% YTD) as share sale hangovers from the Attachmate acquisition and concerns about the HPE merger have hung heavy.

But today we celebrate. We wish Micro Focus, as the standard-bearer of UK quoted tech, well.  

August is normally a ‘go nowhere - other than the beach’-type of month. But NASDAQ managed a near 1% rise (19% YTD) and the FTSE SCS Index, which most closely tracks the UK HQed companies we follow, put on 1.35% (10.8% YTD) It was the Telecos - lead again by BT which was down 6.7% in Aug and down over 20% YTD - that led the laggards. BT’s move into sport is costing them more-and-more as the competition, from many more players other than Sky, hots up.

Excellent to see Blue Prism (business process automation) heading the rankings of UK HQed listed SITS companies this month with a 34% rise - making a massive 156% rise YTD. I rate them highly and they are now getting international acclaim as well. They could well become the UK Tech #1 star in the not-to-distant future.  See Blue Prism H1 revenues more than double. Also impressive continued share price growth at EG Solutions (up 27% (236% YTD). See Momentum at eg Solutions. Among the larger stocks, Computacenter rose 16% (28% YTD) on impressive H1 results. See Strong H1 growth at Computacenter.

At the other end of the scales, SDL dropped 30% (up just 2% YTD) - see Revenue up but margins below par at transforming SDL - and Harvey Nash dropped 12% (but still up 35% YTD) as recruitment was hit. See Profits squeeze at Harvey Nash and downgrades to AIM.

Globally Apple rose 10.3% (41.6% YTD) as the 12^th Sept launch date for the iPhone8(or whatever it will be called) was announced and Q3 figures surprised the market on the upside. See Enthusiasm for Apple Q3. 12^th Sept could be a watershed day. The risks are ‘on the downside’ as Apple needs an exceptional launch to keep up the momentum. If it fails to excite, it could drag many, including the FANGs, down with it.

We first mentioned Hayes-headquartered drone industrial inspection company Sky-Futures in UKHotViews about 18 months ago (see Richard Holway’s Droning on about my trees). They had just picked up an additional $5.7m in a Series A funding round from MMC Ventures and Bristow Group, more than doubling its prior funding.

Timed to coincide with Prime Minister Theresa May’s visit to Japan, Sky-Futures has just announced a £3m investment from Japanese conglomerate, Mitsui, along with a strategic partnership to expand the use of Sky-Futures’ drone-based technology through Mitsui’s clients in the energy, marine and infrastructure sectors.

Founded in 2009 and with offices in the US, Asia and the Middle East, as well as Aberdeen, Sky-Futures is a great example of UK technology going global in a very high potential marketplace. No apologies for droning on about its successes!

Sopra Steria’s plan to acquire French payment systems and secure transactions specialist Galitt marks another step in its strategic push into the financial services market.

Sopra partnered Edinburgh-based Blockchain firm Wallet.Services for a public sector trial in Scotland earlier this month while its Sopra Banking Software division has moved to align more closely with Axway to build a digital platform for European banks (read our report Sopra Steria – Working together in UK Financial Services here).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed but Sopra will initially acquire 88.2% of the company’s shares (100% by 2021) as well as voting rights in Galitt’s holding company Tecfit. Founded in 1990, Galitt will bring 400 customers (including major French banks) and 250 employees into the Sopra fold having generated €31m revenue in FY16.

Potential synergies between Galitt and Sopra Banking Software could deliver further opex savings, and scale up Sopra’s existing payment system capacity. But the integration will need to progress quickly if both companies are to exploit a secure payments market which is undergoing rapid technological and regulatory change.

Some good news from back office workforce management provider eg Solutions, as it announces it has signed a five year master supplier agreement with “a leading provider of business process management in the UK”.

It is essentially the reworking of an agreement with an existing customer, to extend the term.  Under the new agreement eg Solutions is positioned as the preferred supplier for a minimum of five years. The agreement with replace pre-existing annual and three-year term contracts. In terms of financials, it will be worth a minimum of £8.12m over the term, including £1.4m incremental revenue, although it won’t make much difference to licence revenues in the current year. It will make a difference to the order book for recurring revenue though, taking them up to £22.9m and provide improved visibility.

This agreement follows the £2.7m contract eg Solutions signed with a global bank in January (see here) and is an indication of momentum. The company has a turbulent past, its challenge will be maintaining momentum.

On Friday when I wrote about Micro Focus ringing the bell at the NYSE on the occasion of the completion of their reserve takeover of the software bits of HPE, I promised you a photo. Here it is -  courtesy of CFO Mike Phillips.

It also gives me the opportunity to clarify that, although the value of the HPE deal was $8.8b, the market capitalisation/value of Micro Focus at close of play on Friday was $12.76b (or £9.85b).

Many readers - like me - were somewhat perplexed by the many different valuations given by various news/share price feeds. This was because, on the completion of the HPE deal, Micro Focus announced a $500m Return of Value and a Share Consolidation meaning that Micro Focus shareholders receive 0.9263 ‘new’ shares for each existing share + 168.03p cash per share.

So, although most feeds showed a pretty massive 7.5% gain in Micro Focus shares on Friday, actually Micro Focus shares fell by a pretty minimal 7p to close at 2264p.

AIM-listed and MXC-backed Tax Systems plc has had a busy half year as it gets to grips with its new structure (see Tax Systems building strong foundations) and realises the benefits of its recent OSMO acquisition.

The results achieved thus far hint at the potential for the company, with £7m revenue for the six months to end June, implying 7% organic growth with a gross margin of 91% and an Adjusted EBITDA margin just shy of 50%. The results included 3 months performance from OSMO (£0.3m). Despite generating cash of £2.4m in the period, the company has net debt of £23.6m.

The move to organic growth has been achieved through the galvanising of the sales team, a greater emphasis on product management and a closer understanding the requirements of the customer base. This has enabled a 96% customer retention rate and an acceleration of the adoption of other solutions to complement Tax Systems’ cornerstone AlphaTax Corporation Tax Software product. Order intake was up 34%, with some 36 new customers being added. A cloud-based, data entry product has been launched and the core architecture of the portfolio is being re-engineered. This will provide hosted and cloud-based delivery to complement the desktop offering, improve customer experience and offer customers a wider choice.

The addition of OSMO’s technology opens the door to a greater degree of automation and inter-operability across Tax Systems’ portfolio and customer systems, adding to the longer-term potential of the group. The management have set themselves a full agenda as they drive towards faster growth of activity to take the business forward. As corporate customers look to garner cost savings and efficiency in tax calculation and regulatory reporting, they should find that Tax Systems is in an excellent position to meet their requirements.

After smaller two fund-raisings already (reported in HotViews in January this year and April 2016), we learn from TechCrunch that Habito, a “digital mortgage broker”, has just raised a further £18.5m from existing investors via a Series B funding round led by Atomico.

Habito has built the facility to monitor the mortgage offerings available from a broad range of lenders and to find the most appropriate package for aspiring borrowers, or increasingly importantly, those borrowers whose existing mortgage is no longer optimal. Habito’s angle is that it sets out to create an ongoing relationship with the borrower, not just taking a fee for an initial mortgage, but looking to act as a mortgage broker through the lifetime of the loan. This promises to be a much more valuable relationship and one that should also provide savings to the borrower.

The management want to use the new funds to integrate Habito’s technology into the major retail banks and high street lenders. There is a lot of interest across the sector in accelerating the mortgage approval process and Habito’s approach may well prove attractive to several of the larger lenders. A quicker and more tech-led approach should substantially reduce the costs of the whole process, thereby stimulating more switching, a more efficient lending market and more potential for companies like Habito.

If you’re fed up with providing precise delivery instructions time and again when you order stuff online, London startup Exaactly believes it has the answer. Its platform – which looks like a cross between Google Maps and Pinterest – lets you create any number of delivery addresses via unique tags (such as home@@themillersofealing) stored in Exaactly’s cloud. You can then point delivery firms to a specific tag, which also links to maps and other delivery instructions.

Founded in 2016, Exaactly (or, more formally, Universal Beacon Registration Ltd) is a recent graduate from JLAB, the retail business accelerator run by the John Lewis Partnership, and has just raised £260k in a seed funding round backed by Shaf Rasul, Samos Investments, Innvotec’s Oion fund and other angels.

Exaactly is just one of a number of startups addressing this market (if you’ll pardon the pun). Last year I wrote again about what3words (see what3words finds address of new investor and work back), which has divided the entire planet into 57 trillion squares each of 3 metres squared and has assigned unique, randomised three-word combinations to each square, such as ‘gazed.across.like’. You then can use these three words as a sort of postcode to locate any spot in the world using (chargeable) one-word labels.

In contrast, Exaactly is free for consumers but apparently plans to generate revenue through subscriptions to its API, though precisely how that would work was not explained. But a neat idea, anyway.

Here’s an environmentally friendly application for the so-called Internet of Things. Southampton startup, Utonomy, has developed a platform which aims at reducing leakage in gas distribution networks using cloud-based software that automatically optimises gas distribution pressures through electro-mechanical actuators retrofitted to the network.

Founded in 2015, Utonomy has just raised a further £500k in a seed funding round from Foresight Group. This comes on the back of a £1m round last April, which was backed by LBA investors, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ Stephenson Fund and the Enterprise M3 Growth Fund.

Apparently, methane gas leakage from distribution networks is estimated to cost consumers over £5b p.a. as well as releasing the equivalent of 1.7b tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. A leak well worth plugging!

One-time “unicorn” and erstwhile iconoclast Monitise has now been de-listed from AIM and so adds to our list of “Dearly Departed”. Back in the day, Monitise offered the prospect of revolutionising the banking market by enabling established banks to offer services over mobile phones. However, things turned sour due to the sloth of their larger customers and the rate of technological and social change, particularly with the advance of the Apple iPhone. Fundamental changes in business model and an attempt to accelerate development through a link with IBM failed to solve the company’s problems and the result is that Fiserv will be sweeping up their platform assets and experience.

A sad day, really. As we said as Fiserv made the bid, “the [Monitise] founding team had a real vision of transformation across banking and ecommerce. Yes, it all went horribly wrong and this denouement is a million miles away from their ambition, but they were surely right to try.”

AIM-listed Investment firm Tern reported progress “in line” with its business plan and stated objectives for the six month period ending June 2017 after narrowing its focus to companies addressing the Internet of Things (IoT) market. Investment held for trading was up 31% yoy to £10.6m though the company posted a pre-tax loss of £469k, down from a £4.5m profit in H116.

Tern, previously known as Silvermere Energy, has a history of investing in tech start-ups going back to 2013, having purchased stakes in Flexiant (cloud orchestration software), Push Technology (real time data streaming) and Seal Software (content discovery and analytics).

Its latest funding is focussed on firms specialising in IoT connectivity and security tools, with ambitions to hold 12 investments by the end of 2019. Current wards include InVMA (secure connectivity) and platform as a service player Wyld Research (acquired by Tern portfolio firm flexiOps for £70k earlier this year).

But the jewel in the crown looks like Device Authority (formerly Cryptosoft), a specialist in secure IoT authentication in which Tern maintains a £10.5m stake. The company has forged strategic alliances with Intel, Dell, Amazon Web Services, DigiCert, ThingWorx and PTC and won a three year US$300k contract for its KeyScaler automated password management tool with an industrial machinery provider in 2016. Device Authority was valued at US$18m by ipCapital Group in June this year and plans to raise new equity through a private placement that will push its pre-money valuation as high as US$36m according to Tern.

That is not beyond the bounds of possibility with the IoT product and services market on the cusp of significant growth (TechMarketView subscribers can read our reports “IoT: Network Providers Push to Supplant IT Services Players” and “Internet of Things: Time for IT services providers to accelerate their strategies?”.

We guess that any subsequent sale of a profitable Device Authority would go some way to giving Tern the sort of returns it so keenly anticipates.

If you want to know what we think, join us – and well over two hundred CXOs from the world of UK tech and beyond – at our annual flagship event, An Evening with TechMarketView held on Thursday 5th October 2017, in association with Sage,the market leader for integrated accounting, payroll and payment systems. 

We have an exciting evening of future-gazing planned, covering a vast spectrum of trends and issues that we believe will fundamentally determine the prospects for the UK tech market over the next several years.

The entire TechMarketView analyst team will be on stage, though not all at the same time! They will share their views on what the future holds for tech suppliers – from startups to the beasts of the jungle – in a market where the difference between winning and losing has never been more finely balanced, and where customer loyalty is fast becoming a contradiction in terms.

The event commences at 6:30 pm with a welcome drinks reception and includes a sumptuous three-course meal and second drinks reception. During the course of the evening there will be plenty of opportunity for you to tap the brains of the TechMarketView analyst team, as well as meeting your peers in the industry.

An Evening with TechMarketView will be held at the magnificent premises of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) at 66 Portland Place, W1B 1AD. Tickets cost £525 (£425 for TechMarketView research subscription clients). 

For further details and to book places please visit the tx2Events website, or contact our event coordinator Tina Compton (tina.compton@tx2events.com). 

An Evening with TechMarketView has been a sell-out for the last four years, so book now and secure your place at what so many executives tell us is the one industry event they simply can’t afford to miss!

The TechMarketView Evening 2017 is proudly sponsored by

Looks as though it is 3^rd time lucky for French Schneider Electric’s bid to ‘acquire’ the UK’s Aveva. This morning it was announced that Schneider would undertake a reverse takeover of Aveva contributing £550m in cash. With ‘excess cash’ of £100m on Aveva’s balance sheet, Aveva shareholders will end up with 1014p in cash per share plus a 40% stake in the new business. Aveva shares have leaped by 29% in early trading.

The ‘new Aveva’ will have combined revenues of c£658m and operating profits of c£150m and will, in the words of Aveva’s  Chairman Philip Aiken ‘be transformational to Aveva, creating a global leader in industrial software which will be able to better compete on a global scale’. In particular Schneider will provide higher exposure to the US market.

I had contemplated headlining this announcement with ‘Yet another major UK-HQed software company falls into foreign hands’. But it is not quite as easy as that. Aveva retains its London listing and will retain its base in Cambridge. As I have often said, share ownership is not the major issue - it is where control resides. Here the outlook is less certain. Obviously Schneider is the majority shareholder so I expect control to be in France. The CEO for the new Aveva has not been decided. James Kidd who was Aveva’s CFO before being elevated to CEO in Jan 17 will become CFO of the new Aveva until that appointment is made.

We have reported on the ‘will they, won’t they’ courtship between Schneider on several occasions since the first approach in 2015. See - Aveva joins ‘entente cordiale’ with Schneider dated 30^th July 15. But they all broke down - I suspect more related to personalities and how the combined entity would be run, rather than price. The interest was renewed in June 16 - See Scheider Electric renews bid for Aveva.

The CEO at that time was Richard Longdon who had been with Aveva for 33 years - 17 years as CEO. He was - with good reason - fiercely proud and, I suspect, never quite got round to accepting French control of his baby. But ever since Longdon announced he was stepping down in July 16 (effective 31^st Dec 16), the chances of the Schneider deal being consummated was back on the cards.

The deal today is higher than the preceding deals. My friend George O’Connor often said that a deal over £22 would win the day - and as the shares stand at over £23 today, how right Aveva was to wait.

Longdon should indeed be very proud of his achievements - not least for shareholders. You may remember Aveva used to be called CadCentre. As such I awarded them the accolade as Best performing share of the millennium back in 2015. Indeed, Cadcentre shares traded at 107p on 31^st Dec 1999. Today they are up a massive 23x at 2469p. So thankyou Mr Longdon - your work is done!

Note - Richard Holway is a long term shareholder in Aveva. 

AIM-listed digital media and tech provider, RhythmOne (previously known as Blinkx), has been through a period of substantial change (see RhythmOne acquisition and CEO change from June and work back). Now it is embarking on another acquisition – this one substantial. Following hints of further acquisitions earlier in the year (see Progress on strategic change at RhythmOne), and press speculation towards the end of August that it was acquire NYSE-listed YuMe Inc, the company has confirmed it expects the transaction to complete in Q1 next year.

The two California-based companies – both of which were founded in 2004 – had similar revenues in their last completed financial years. RhythmOne’s revenues stood at $141m, while YuMe reported revenues of $160m. Both struggled with profitability: RhythmOne reported a loss of $17.5m, meanwhile, YuMe’s net loss was $7.7m (though it did make a small net profit in H117). We had commented previously that RhythmOne had yet to stabilise the shape and balance of its business, so taking YuMe - for which it is paying $185m (in a mixture of cash and shares) – into the fold is a brave move. However, should all go to plan, RhythmOne expects the enlarged group to have a strong balance sheet, revenue growth and EBITDA generation; the aim is that cost synergies will result in savings of $10-12m per annum before tax.

Strategically, it is easy to see the logic behind the move. As well as bringing commercial and financial scale at a time when the digital advertising industry is consolidating, RhythmOne believes it will now, in line with its mission, be able to offer a complete end-to-end platform for advertisers that is efficient and effective at reaching targeted engaged audiences at scale. The merger brings together the demand-side strengths and innovation in video advertising from YuMe with the supply-side strengths from RhythmOne (built into its programmatic platform) to better serve the fast-growing segments of mobile, video, connected TV and programmatic trading.

If successfully executed, the Directors believe that, “as a result of the acquisition, the Company will be a more attractive alternative to the largest networks and exchanges, represented by companies such as Google and Facebook”. RhythmOne has bitten off a lot… it has a new CEO, it is still integrating previous acquisitions, and it was still in the process of stabilising the business. It has set itself a big challenge with this latest move.

When we reported on Craneware’s results last year (see Craneware in rude health…) we suggested that this Edinburgh-based company was on course for another good year in the US Healthcare market. Today’s results for the year to end June show that they have, by and large, delivered. Headline figures showed revenue growth of 16% to US$58m with EBITDA up 13% to US$18m and pre-tax profits increasing 22% to US$16.9m.

Looking through the TechMarketView HotViews archive (available to subscribers to our research streams) we can see that Craneware has made significant progress in taking a holistic and “joined-up” approach to hospital management systems and patient care. Reported revenue growth has picked up and the company now seems well placed with its Value Cycle concept and new Trisus cloud-based technology platform. The continued focus across the industry on analytics, where Craneware appears strong through its Healthcare Intelligence operation, is also a significant positive.

Craneware can number 25% of all US hospitals among its customers so a major focus going forward will be increasing share of wallet, by adding capability onto the Trisus platform and so broadening the base of its Value Cycle approach. New product offers include automated and intelligent claims processing and better management of individual patient payments. These have all contributed to a record sales pipeline which should generate revenue growth and we would expect an improvement in EBITDA margins. Cash generation has remained strong and Craneware will be looking to buy additional capabilities to deliver over the cloud-based platform.

The US healthcare market continues to grow, with particular focus on value for money, improved cost control and the efficient delivery of appropriate healthcare. Craneware’s strategy has placed it in a good position, so again we can look forward to another good year.

The UK’s reputation for innovation in computer-generated imaging has been further enhanced with news that private equity firm NorthEdge Capital has taken a minority stake in Manchester-based digital animation house Cubic Motion for a mooted £20m (Source: FT). Founded in 2009, Cubic Motion specialises in photo-realistic facial animation systems for top-name games publishers.

According to the FT article, Cubic Motion doubled its revenues to £3m last year, and aims to open an office in California. NorthEdge sees the opportunity for Cubic Motion to expand into the movie industry, social media and other VR applications.

If the reported numbers are correct, then Cubic Motion is being valued north of £40m, which for a £3m revenue company clearly shows a lot of faith in its potential.

AIM listed back office optimisation provider eg Solutions has had several ‘transformational’ years over recent times but now it is facing its biggest change yet, having agreed to be acquired by Verint Systems through Verint’s UK business.

Melville, New York HQ’d Verint, who styles itself as a company ‘powering actionable intelligence’, provides customer engagement software and services plus data mining for intelligence and security though a portfolio comprising voice of the customer, workforce optimisation employee engagement, and security, fraud and compliance. eg Solutions will bolster Verint’s workforce optimisation assets and there is also alignment because both companies work to unify front and back office activities in the pursuit of better engagement. With revenue of £8.2m in its last full year eg Solutions will be subsumed into Verint which delivered revenue of $2.5bn at group level.

It is a cash deal, worth £26.3bn, which the eg Solutions board is recommending to shareholders. Its market capitalisation the day before the offer was £28.3m although there has been little institutional trading so the offer is higher than the average price over the last six months and it is being presented as something along the lines of a best exit deal for shareholders. Verint describes it as a growth not a cost cutting acquisition so there are no immediate plans to shed staff although the eg Solutions board will resign, including founder Elizabeth Gooch.

eg Solutions has had a turbulent past which includes tumultuous change with board level shifts, departures and returns in 2014 and similar again in 2016 (see here). It also sold 9.5% of the business to partner Aspect and invested heavily in the Aspect business, but Aspect filed for bankruptcy in 2016. Although this is another UK business effectively being taken over by a US firm, the sale to Verint may well provide the stability and ongoing investment the eg Solutions business needs.

EU Supply, the Stockholm-headquartered but AIM-listed public sector tender management platform, has turned its first profit. The company registered first half revenue of £2.17m (up +30% at constant currency), which helped generate an operating profit of £9k. That might sound like small beans, but it is a marked improvement from last year’s loss of £673k. The company was also cash generative for the second consecutive six-month period.

Revenue growth was derived from both new contracts – which helped expand the company’s recurring revenue base – and from additional contracts with existing customers. EU Supply says it's seeing “increasing” market activity, which is in part driven by the requirement for mandatory e-tendering provisions at milestones before November 2018 in EU/EEC states. Furthermore, the company has previously said it sees limited long-term BREXIT impact. However, with such a small profit on the books, the company must hold on tight to operational costs and maintain its sales execution to ensure it doesn’t slip back into the red.