Mr. Anderson: Theratase was set up in 1993 as Enviromed Plc, had a very unsettled and troubled early history, made a few acquisitions along the road, sold some stuff off, lost a lot of money; the share price went from a float of GBP1.10 to a peak of GBP1.40 to a trough of 4.5p. We went through many trials and tribulations, several boards, several Chief Executives, several Chairmen, a lot of litigation, and ended up getting into recovery. We're now in the happy situation that all of the past problems have been solved; we are slimmed down to a single main operating business called Biozyme, profitable and cash-generative, very small as a Plc - one of the smallest companies in terms of turnover and market capitalisation, not just on the techMARK but also on the main exchange. The main operating company Biozyme is a manufacturer and supplier of enzymes largely to the diagnostics industry. To give you some idea of the scale of the business, we've done a trading statement recently implying that turnover is flat at about GBP5.6 million, and we will beat our broker's pre-tax profit forecasts, which was at GBP1.8 million, by 10%.
TWST: Let's turn to the trading statement, in that case, which seems to
flag a promising new start. To what do you attribute this improvement?
What's your analysis?
Mr. Anderson: Basically what we're doing is bringing the business to a
point where the natural profits of the business are coming through and
we're no longer producing profits that are being downwardly affected by
the problems of the past. There is one element in the 2000 accounts
which had a cost impact which is past-related - going forward that will
all drop out. We've put some effort into developing the processes to
reduce the cost of manufacturing, and we've cut a lot of the dead wood
costs out of the Plc itself. We've got rid of a lot of empty properties,
we've cut our legal costs, and cut our accounting costs. This year we
didn't quite hit our original turnover target, and when it became
increasingly obvious that we were going to miss that target we took
action to cut down on things like consultancy costs in an attempt to
make sure that the profitability was still there. In the end we came in
very slightly shy of our quite ambitious turnover target and improved
the profitability by about 40%.
Tickers included in this excerpt: THE.L
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