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TWST: Can we start with an update on how WILink (London:WLK.L) is positioned today?

Mr. Wakeham: I think what we’ve done this year has been significant on a number of fronts. First, we’ve been able to grow in a pretty tough market. Second, we’ve made our product range much more attractive and valuable to our clients. And thirdly, we’ve worked hard on our shareholders’ behalf, making the company more valuable for them. Starting with the product range, if I may, what we chose to do this year was take our existing product range plus other products that we developed ourselves or were marketing as part of a strategic alliance and package them all together into a much better integrated, mutually reinforcing product range, which for the corporate market we’re calling Precision IR and for the mutual fund market Precision FM. And as those brand names imply, the value proposition to our clients with these respective product ranges is that they are helping them target potential and existing investors in a more focused way, helping them get their messages out to their chosen audiences and then also helping them assess how well those messages have got through and hence refine the communications and the targeting of audiences as well.

TWST: How do you see WILink positioned vis-à-vis some of the bigger players in the space?

Mr. Wakeham: I would say our range is more focused, but is also actually quite complementary. In fact, one of the products that we are marketing in our range is through an alliance with Thomson and we have areas of our business in Europe where we share marketing with PR Newswire. So whilst we are in competition, it’s in a complementary way. We tend to be offering substitute products rather than directly competing, except when it comes to webcasting. But, when you look at PR Newswire or ourselves that’s not a big slice of our respective pies and therefore it’s possible to find ways to cooperate in other areas.

TWST: How would you summarize your key objectives for the coming 12 to 24 months?

Mr. Wakeham: We’re in a closed period so I have to be reasonably cautious about what I can say. There are three main priorities. First, we want to improve our penetration of stock exchanges by keeping our client base ahead of the decline in stock market listings. Just about every stock market at the moment is seeing a decrease in the number of companies that are listed so it’s pretty hard to keep your client base flat but doing better than the market is a key objective. Second, we want to see the additional products that we’ve bolted onto the range grow, so that we can genuinely point to ourselves as being a company that’s offering a range of investor relation services rather than being seen as the annual report company, which was the label we had in the past and the one we’ve been trying to build away from. Thirdly, we want to expand our range geographically, initially in Europe and then into Australasia and the Far East.

TWST: Do you feel the investment community has a good understanding of your story at his stage?

Mr. Wakeham: I think so. There’s always a percentage that catch on a bit too late. What really disappoints me is the lack of the media attention. We announced our trading update in November where we said we’d end 2002 in excess of market expectation by about 10%. We said we thought we’d get close to £2.6 million profit instead of the £2.3 million that the market was expecting and I think without exaggeration it got no coverage whatsoever as a story. Now in an idealistic world you’d think that this is interesting -- somebody who is in the investor relations market, playing in a market that’s declining, that has actually beaten expectations, but the reality is nobody really took any interest in it; whereas, I can’t prove this but I expect if we’d come out with a profit warning we’d have got quite a bit of coverage. So I think investors who we talk to directly -- and we’ve done that several times this year -- seem pretty clued up, but the broader audience is not getting to hear our message as much as we would like.