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TWST: Can we start with a quick introduction to Global Graphics (Euronext: GLOG.BR)?

Mr. Freidah: I’ll start with just a quick clarification of my position in the company. I am the Chief Operating Officer and I deal with the day-to-day running of the business. Johan Volckaerts, who you spoke to about a year ago, is the Company’s CEO and Chairman of the Board and he is less involved in the day-to-day business. As far as a brief history, the company built up through acquisitions, originally starting out with the acquisition of a hardware manufacturing company in France in December 1996, which is why we are technically a French-based company, and that involved the flexographic plate-making equipment. The company then went public in June 1998 on Easdaq (now Nasdaq Europe), growing through acquiring various competitors and expanding into the offset printing side of the business. At one point, we did look to get involved more in the digital and software side of print and we acquired a UK-based company called Harlequin in July 1999, which was a high-end graphic arts manufacturer of RIPs. Just to define what a RIP is, it stands for Raster Image Processing. Anyone that works on a computer screen and is involved with text, graphics, digital camera images, scanned images and so forth, somewhere along the line that information gets printed, whether it’s high-end printing presses or your HP Deskjet. And at the printing stage, you’ve got to go through the process of taking all that information and making the dots that come out on these devices; that’s where RIPing comes into play. Going back to the history, we acquired Harlequin and also did a number of other software acquisitions, one being fairly significant for us: a division of a company called 5D, which involved their Jaws product line -- another RIP used for the lower-end embedded in devices side of the market -- and also some very interesting document workflow software involved with the conversion and creation of PDF documents which, as you know, is the format that Adobe has pushed very hard with the Acrobat reader. So, we picked up some of that technology in August 2000. We’ve done a couple of other small technology acquisitions on the software side: we picked up some workflow technology out of a company called Harris Publishing in October 2000, which gave us some patented drag-and-drop GUI (Graphical User Interface) technology used for workflow; and recently we acquired some more technology from Ansyr, a small start-up company out in Seattle, that expanded our activities around the PDF arena to add-in not only manipulation but also viewing, some types of document page editing, and so forth. Now, during the last two years, at the back end of 2001, the hardware side of the business was hit very hard. As an OEM manufacturer, we were providing equipment for a lot of major companies like Kodak and Dupont, but those markets were hit very hard and as a consequence the amount of equipment required to meet the needs of those very large suppliers was greatly diminished. I mean, the hardware business was hit very hard. At the beginning of last year, however, we actually divested of the hardware part of the business. We also divested 90% of a small software company called Xanalys, a spin-off of Harlequin, which was involved in technology outside of graphic arts. So, when I say we went full circle, I mean Global Graphics is now basically a software company. Our statement is that Global Graphics today is a leading developer and supplier of high-end RIPS, PDF document workflow and color solutions for OEM-type manufacturers. We don’t therefore sell to the end users; rather, we provide technology and products to companies that integrate it with their hardware and their software. We sell to some of the world’s largest players in that area – companies like Agfa, Kodak, Heidelburg, HP, Creo, Mitsubishi, and so forth. So, that’s where we are today -- a hardware company that became a software company.