Evesham Technology

» see evesham.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Evesham Micros opened in 1983 in a Worcestershire market town and made its name by selling other manufacturers' computers for less than anyone else would. Amstrads first. Then it became the largest supplier of the Atari ST in Britain by buying stock in bulk, cleared the remainder of Amstrad's PC 2000 line in December 1991, and at one point shifted an end-of-line Olivetti as the first PC sold in the UK under £300. Along the way it designed hardware of its own, including a 48K memory upgrade for the ZX Spectrum and a disk accelerator for the Commodore 64 called Dolphin DOS.

By the mid-2000s it had become something else. It built its own machines at Vale Park, merged with a Welsh firm called Mertec in 2002, sold storage servers under an OEM deal with FalconStor, and ran 19 shops from Glasgow down to Southampton. BECTA recommended it to schools. More than 300 people worked there. Much of that business sat on the Home Computer Initiative, the government scheme that let employers lease a PC to staff out of pre-tax salary, and when the scheme was withdrawn the orders it had generated did not come back.

The company entered administration on Friday 3 August 2007 with DTE Leonard Curtis appointed. A rescue followed within weeks, and then on the morning of 4 January 2008 Richard Austin emailed staff to say that things were suddenly moving quicker than expected. The administrators asked him to call a meeting for two o'clock that afternoon, and the thirty people still working at Vale Park were told there that Evesham Technology had folded.

~ the dossier ~

~ not bailiffs ~

The August collapse happened in public and in a hurry. Staff were let go the same Friday the administrators arrived, some of them after fifteen years with the firm, leaving 138 behind. Word went round that heavies had turned up at Vale Park and turfed people out, and Austin told the trade press that this was fiction, that no bailiffs had come and none would, and that what the staff had seen were administrators being taken for bailiffs. Both accounts are of the same afternoon in the same building.

The rescue came from an unexpected direction. Tahir Mohsan, who had founded Time Computers, the other large British PC seller of the period, put $22 million into Evesham through a Dubai investment vehicle called PCC Technology. A new company, Geemore Technology Ltd, was set up with Austin as a director to keep the trading going, and a dormant company part-owned by Mohsan, the Elite Logo Company, was registered as its secretary.

~ the brand nobody bought ~

Austin quit his directorship at Geemore on 4 January 2008, the same day the staff were sent home, and was replaced by John Aikman. Ten days later the Evesham Micros company name was formally changed at Companies House to Geemore Technology Ltd, so the name that had been over the door since 1983 came off the register in the middle of January. On 21 February PCC issued a press release saying the restructuring had been successfully completed and that the Evesham brand was for sale.

No buyer appeared. Geemore kept going into the spring on a reduced footing and then stopped, and the temporary contracts of the last staff expired with it. Warranties were the casualty nobody had planned for: PCC had not taken on the obligation to honor them, so machines sold months earlier under a guarantee were suddenly unsupported. A group of former employees started a small repair outfit nearby and kept fixing Eveshams after there was no Evesham.

~ the creditors ~

Turkey never had a company shaped like this one. The high-street PC chain, with a magazine advertisement giving a model name and a price, and a shop in your own town where you could go and buy that exact model, was a British arrangement. In Turkey through those same years the machine came off a counter in a computer bazaar, assembled from a list of parts while you waited, and the name on the case was whichever one the shop had boxes of.

The administrators' report, covered by the trade press in 2009, put the outstanding debts across Evesham Technology, Evesham Technology Holdings and Mertec Evesham Technology at £6.78 million. Claims of more than £3.6 million came in from secured creditors, among them Microsoft, AMD, Western Digital, Ingram Micro and Computer 2000, and the administrator wrote that he did not expect any surplus to reach unsecured creditors at all. Austin's own director's loan account was overdrawn by £650,000, and £150,000 was accepted in settlement of it after an analysis of his personal assets.

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