Baltimore cuts losses, promises more sell-offs


16 Sep 2003

Despite reducing losses in the first have of this year to £2.2m sterling from £9.9m sterling, Baltimore Technologies has said that it still plans to continue generating cash through more disposals of company divisions.

The company this morning reported total revenues for the first half of this year of £9.7m sterling, compared with £22.1m sterling at the same time last year.

The company said it retained a cash balance of £14.6m sterling and anticipates a further £15.3m sterling in gross proceeds from the sales of its SelectAccess business to Hewlett-Packard earlier this year for £8m sterling, the sale of its Omniroot managed services division to BeTRUSTed for BeTRUSTed £2m sterling and a financial settlement with Clearswift for £4.5m sterling on the sale of Content Technologies last year.

Baltmore said that headcount at the company has been halved to 255 people, compared to 422 people this time last year.

The first half of the year for Baltimore was marked a number of major contract wins for the company’s UniCERT public key infrastructure (PKI) encryption product family with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, the Government of Finland, the Hong Kong Post Office and Intelink.

Commenting on the first half of the year’s performance, chief executive Bijan Khezri, said: “During the reported period, we succeeded in cutting our losses further and continued to demonstrate the outstanding competitiveness of our core PKI business by winning some of the world’s leading e-government projects.

“We will continue generating cash through divestments and further reduce the cash burn of existing operations. We will not tolerate any operational cash burn beyond the end of the year and are prepared to deploy all available means to maximise value for our shareholders,” Khezri said.

By John Kennedy