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TWST: Can you give us a brief overview and history of Danka (London:DNK.L; NasdaqSC:DANKY)?

Mr. Dumond: Danka was founded in 1977 in Tampa, Florida. During its first decade it expanded in the South Eastern United States opening or acquiring businesses selling and servicing photocopiers. At the end of this period it had a spread of operations across Florida, Southern Georgia and Southern Alabama. On going public in 1987 the company embarked upon an aggressive strategy of dealer rollups, which by 1993 had given it coverage in most of the major cities in the US. In that year it entered Europe with the acquisition of a large dealer in the UK and in 1995, it expanded the coverage by buying the Infotec business, which had operations in eight countries in Western Europe. In 1996 the company completed the largest acquisition in its history, the distribution arm of Kodak’s Office Imaging division, which had operations in 32 countries worldwide. The company took on $700 million of debt to fund the Kodak Office imaging acquisition, which led to a financial crisis in 1998 when the earnings didn’t come through at the levels projected at the time of the original deal. From late 1998 the immediate focus was working closely with our banks, debt reduction and the repositioning our business. We had a number of management changes. The founder of the company Dan Doyle left in the autumn of 1998 and this was followed by a number of other management changes. Lang Lowrey, our current chief executive joined Danka in March 2001 and Peter Williams joined after that in July 2001. In fact, the management team was completely overhauled from 2001 onwards. Our historical business of selling photocopiers and fax machines has changed. In fact the photocopiers have now become multi functional devices with print, e-mail, scan and fax functionality which form a document management hub within an office environment. We continue to operate 25 countries of which the US represents about 55 percent of the total sales and Europe is the lion’s share of the remainder. We also have operations in Canada, Australia and operations in Latin America.

TWST: How are you trying to build brand awareness in Europe?

Mr. Williams: The Danka brand is key to our long term success and gaining recognition of that brand is increasingly important within an industry where differentiation is crucial. We recently launched a series of television advertisements in the USA which promote the Danka brand and launch our Danka@ the Desktop strategy. The theme of the advertisement is based around a group of talking copiers and printers who are sitting in a bar, complaining about their lot. The Barman (a human) tells them that Danka could solve all their problems. This takes the emphasis of the brand away from the equipment and focuses on Danka as an overall Solutions provider. We will shortly be introducing this advertisement into Europe, as well as a campaign focused on the key publications which are read by the Senior Management in our target customer groups. You may also know that Danka UK are ‘official suppliers to the European Professional Golf Association Tour and Seniors Tour’. As an independent supplier, we actively promote a range of equipment brands. We also sell Danka branded products. In the US, we sell a combination of manufacturers’ brands.

TWST: Can you provide an outline of your management team and the strengths that the key people bring to the company?

Mr. Dumond: Certainly, I am sure Peter will comment because he has worked with one or two of them before, but essentially starting at the top, Lang Lowrey has been with us since March 2001 and one of his principal involvements in the past was with Anacomp and there he actually served with Peter.

Mr. Williams: Both Lang and I are very familiar with the Document and Imaging industries; in particular, in computer output to microfilm (COM), the supply of devices and solutions for microfilm, and moving into document management. I might also mention Don Thurman at this point who is our chief growth and marketing officer who also has a document management background from within Anacomp. This gives us a good platform to develop Danka’s new strategy. Then my counterpart in the US is Todd Mavis, formally with Michell International. He is the COO and EVP of Danka Office Imaging. His background is predominantly software sales and again that puts him in a very good position to perfect some of our growth strategies. Mark Wolfinger is the CFO. He has held senior financial positions with Grand Metropolitan PLC and Pepsi Co.

Mr. Dumond: In fact Mark joined just after the time the company first encountered difficulties with the banks. So he has been doing some stellar work in taking Danka through this transition. Lang has worked very hard in upgrading and extending the board of directors and I think it is outstanding. We are seeing the board play a very interactive role in strategy development and the board members have strong technical and financial pedigrees.