Dabs.com claims return to profit
Online reseller Dabs.com has claimed that it is already back in profit as it recoups the costs of moving from a telephone mail-order sales operation to the web.
Online reseller Dabs.com has claimed that it is already back in profit as it recoups the costs of moving from a telephone mail-order sales operation to the web.
The company this week filed its first ever loss in 13 years of trading, after losing £1.2m for the year ended 31 March 2000. However, managing director David Atherton said that preliminary figures for its half year to 30 September show a profit of over £250,000.
Atherton said the company had spent heavily to achieve high-volume sales in the consumer IT online market, and that it was now seeing the results. "We joined during the mad internet year when a lot of dotcoms came and went," he said. The undertaking was "costly" but many more companies in the sector made "much larger losses", he added.
In January, Dabs.com reported turnover of £10m and predicted profit of over £500,000 on its full-year results. "The future is definitely looking good for Dabs.com. We are not in trouble, we have plenty of cash and we are paying all our bills," he said.
However, he conceded that procedural problems discovered by auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers had had some repercussions. "We have had some of our insurance cover reduced because we filed the accounts late, which obviously doesn't help," said Atherton.
Plans for the company include expanding the consumer electronics side of the business and building on the recently-launched online auction website, dabsxchange.com.
Chris Jones, a senior analyst at Canalys.com, said dotcoms such as Dabs had done a good job transferring from a catalogue to an online ordering service, but had suffered from a slowdown in the IT market.
"Companies such as Dabs, Jungle and Microwarehouse have done well in getting their customers to buy online, but have suffered from the general weakness of the market in 2000," he said.
First published in Computer Reseller News