MDIS revives fortunes with refinance scheme

MDIS is seeing the first fruits of its turnaround strategy after managing to reduce its interim pre-tax losses by half.

Last month, the company set up an emergency refinancing plan to save itself from insolvency. The scheme involved placing 260 million shares with an opening offer of 104.8 million shares at 26 pence.

In June, it set up Glovia, a joint venture with Fujitsu, to help finance Chess, MDIS? US-based manufacturing applications product.

The group posted a pre-tax loss of #3.9 million for the first six months of the year, ended 30 June, compared with #9.2 million last year. Turnover for the first six months was #54.4 million in 1997, against #51.2 million for the same period last year.

The improvement was attributed to an increase in MDIS? public sector sales which reported operating profits of #3.1 million, compared with #800,000 last year.

The firm?s corporate sector business also increased operating profit from #1.1 million to #1.8 million, while losses from its human resource systems fell by #300,000 to #3 million. Its Chess business also improved its losses to #3.4 million.