Another placing from Synchronica
Article Date: Feb 20 2008Mobile communications specialist Synchronica has raised £2 million one month after saying it had ‘sufficient cash to meet its present needs’.
The bombed-out AIM company has placed shares at 7p through broker Seymour Pierce partly to expand its sales and marketing in emerging markets. Tunbridge Wells-based Synchronica last month flagged up a halving of 2007 losses to £3 million and said it had adequate cash after raising £1.87 million at 6.25p.
But now Synchronica decided it wants more money to make a push for markets that lack elaborate existing communications networks and where attaching email capability to simple mobile phones could be big business. Founder and chief executive officer Carsten Brinkschulte argues Synchronica’s Mobile Gateway 3.5 ‘push’ email and synchronisation software is ‘geared to the specific requirements of emerging markets and can deliver email to more than three billion phones worldwide’.
Brinkschulte, who has been striving to steer Synchronica back to health since it lost its way within ill-starred mobile services venture DAT Group, has contributed about £20,000 to the latest placing, which the company says has attracted two new institutional investors. Last August, Synchronica won a potentially lucrative contract with US network computing solutions group Sun Microsystems and more recently the company agreed an international marketing joint venture with Miami-based Brightstar, a leading distributor to mobile systems.
Floated at 130p in 2004, the shares soared to 530p before collapsing all the way to 6.88p by last June. Now 7.62p, down 0.25p this morning, the appeal is speculative.
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