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TWST: Can we start with a profile of Abacus Group (London:ABU.L) and some of the important milestones in your history?

Mr. Kent: Abacus started life in 1972 as a very small broker business - non franchised distribution, but the real milestone was in 1989. Abacus was subject to a management buyout by myself and three other employees. We took it on to the main London Stock Exchange in November 93 and have grown it since then through a mixture of organic growth and acquisition. Our financial year-ends in September - last financial year we had sales of 201 million Pounds Sterling with a ROS of 8.5%. We currently have businesses in the UK and Eire, all four countries in the Nordic region and an affiliate company in Italy. The main business is electronic component distribution franchised now. We hold 85 franchises across the group and we also have within the group two electromechanical subcontract businesses. We don’t do printed circuit board assembling ourselves, but we do electromechanical subcontract work. We also have in the group a business that sells displays, printers, card readers and related products. A lot of its business is actually putting together systems fitted to the customers’ requirement rather than just distribution of the components. I think that summarizes it fairly well.

TWST: What can you tell us about the market size for your products and who are some of the typical customers who use your products?

Mr. Kent: Well in the UK, there is a UK Industry Association, which is called AFDEC it’s a UK distribution association similar to the USA association called NEDA. AFDEC forecasts the current distribution marketplace in the United Kingdom for the products that we sell - about 1.1 billion Pounds Sterling. The Nordic region where we also operate has a market size about 2/3rds of the size of the UK. And Italy is about the same size as Nordic. I think in the security market the typical customer of ours would be a company called Apollo who make fire detection units. In the telecommunication’s area perhaps our typical customer will be somebody like Avaya, which is a Lucent Technologies company.

TWST: What makes your company different?

Mr. Kent: We have a genuine belief in differences in regions and cultures, so we are not a company that thinks the United Kingdom is actually just one country; we recognize it as four separate countries and then within those four separate countries there are actually different cultures within different regions. We have within the United Kingdom and Eire, 17 regionally based sales offices. We have in the Nordic countries, 10 regionally based sales offices. And in Italy we have 7. Whereas a lot of our competitors operate out of possibly just one or two main offices. So that’s our biggest difference.

TWST: What are your thoughts on the current state of your market?

Mr. Kent: It’s down significantly from where it was last year. We just announced our half year results to 31st March 2002. We announced that our sales had declined by 27% over the same period last year, but the market had declined by 35%, according to the AFDEC stats that we have, so we were pleased with the results and that we have taken market share. We also announced an ROS of 6.0% despite the difficult market conditions.