Mr. van Someren: nCipher is a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange -- ticker symbol is NCH. It was founded by myself and my brother in 1996 and became public in October 2000. nCipher is in the business of selling Internet security products which employ cryptography to help secure points of risk within corporate enterprises. Our specific roles fall into four major categories: in securing traffic at the passes of a network; in securing the web services which are connected to those networks and form the presence of enterprises, outward facing from the corporation; in the application services behind those web services where the real business of the enterprise is carried out; and finally in the databases -- securing the data as it remains at rest in databases for the long-term. This business is a global business. We make our sales in all of the major world regions. nCipher's headquarters in Cambridge, England is where the research and development operations are carried out, and the US headquarters is in Woburn, outside Boston, Massachusetts.
TWST: It has been about a year since we last spoke. Can you touch on some of the corporate milestones, some of the goals that were accomplished over that time period?
Mr. van Someren: 2001 was obviously a difficult year for all IT companies and nCipher is fortunate, I think, to be in a sub sector -- in security -- which perhaps fared better than some. The business was able to experience quite significant growth in the period up to 2001. But through 2001 it's been a more difficult market and we have seen particularly the kind of delay in purchasing cycle which has become characteristic of the IT business. Nevertheless, during the course of the year, we achieved a number of our strategic goals. Notably we increased the proportion of our revenue which was generated in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region and we established operations in the Asia pacific region. So this enabled us to spread some of the revenue more widely than the quite strong focus we had on North America prior to 2001, and that has helped us to diminish the impact of the U.S. economic downturn. During the course of the year the revenue achieved in each of those geographic market segments has varied segment by segment. But it was noticeable as we came to end the end of 2001, the decline which we had experienced in revenues in both the United States and in Europe was beginning to slacken off, particularly in the United States. As we exited 2001, we saw quarterly revenues which were substantially the same in Q4 as they were in Q3. So this gives perhaps the beginnings of indications that there may be a turnaround starting to emerge in the IT market for security products.
Tickers included in this excerpt: NCH.L
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