JTT Computer

» see jtt.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Tomasz Czechowicz started JTT Computer in Wrocław in 1990 with two partners, Janusz Krasnopolski and Tomasz Gomułkiewicz. Within a year it was the general distributor for Commodore and Atari in Poland. In 1992 it moved 130,000 computers and 93 percent of them were Commodores, a share that says as much about the Polish market that year as it does about JTT.

In 1993 the company opened an assembly plant rated at 200,000 machines a year. The Commodore share of its sales fell to 7 percent almost immediately and PCs took over at better than 60 percent of the business, sold under its own Adax brand. That is the home-computer-to-PC switch compressed into about eighteen months of one company's sales mix.

I have put machines together from a parts list, which is the hobbyist end of what JTT was doing. The distance between that and this company is a plant with a six-figure annual capacity and a national retail channel to fill. What finished it was a tax inspection.

~ the zero rate ~

Polish law in the late 1990s put a zero VAT rate on computer equipment sold to schools. JTT sold machines to foreign firms and then bought them back as imports, which qualified the goods for the rate. Tax officials found the arrangement unlawful and the company was made to pay 10 million złoty in tax and penalties. Its board was separately charged with acting to the detriment of the State Treasury.

The assessment was not an allegation that the sales were invented. It was an argument about the route the machines took to reach the invoice, and it moved up through the instances while the company carried the bill.

~ 2003 ~

The Supreme Administrative Court ruled in 2003 that JTT's board had broken no law, and ordered the full amount of the improperly collected tax returned with interest. By then the company had spent four years paying for it.

In mid-2004 the board applied to the courts for bankruptcy and liquidation. Eurofound logs the announcement at 10 June 2004, sourced to Rzeczpospolita of the following day, with 400 jobs going. Other companies in the group went the same way.

~ the damages that would not stay awarded ~

MCI Management, the fund Czechowicz built after leaving, had taken JTT shares as a contribution in 1998 and sued the State Treasury over what the tax decisions had done to them. A Wrocław court put the figure at 38.5 million złoty in November 2006, in a ruling that was not final. An appeal court awarded 28.9 million in April 2011 and the Supreme Court set it aside. The appeal court awarded 28.8 million on the remand, and in March 2014 the Supreme Court set that one aside too.

~ the two domains ~

jtt.pl today redirects to an unrelated investment company. There is a live Polish gaming-PC line selling at adax.pl under the Adax name, and nothing in the sources connects it to the brand JTT built, so read it as a word that came free rather than a continuation. The company won its argument in 2003 and applied for bankruptcy the following June.

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