Prokom Software

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

~ the last words ~

The Polish commercial register records it as entry 49 on the file of a company in Rzeszow: date of entry 1 April 2008, circumstance, the taking over of another company. The mechanism was the transfer of the entire property of Prokom to Asseco in exchange for newly issued shares, under article 492 of the commercial companies code, which dissolves the acquired company without a liquidation. Shares had stopped trading on 31 March. The last price anyone paid for one, on the Friday before, was 128 zloty.

What died was the largest IT company Poland had. Group revenue for 2007 came to 1.92 billion zloty with net profit of 369 million, against the 1.28 billion that Asseco turned over in the same year, so the thing being swallowed was about half again the size of the thing swallowing it. The registered seat at the end was Warsaw, though everyone associated the company with Gdynia on the Baltic coast, where it started in 1987 by selling computers rather than writing anything.

Ryszard Krauze is usually described as the founder. The careful version is that he came back to Poland in 1987 with money earned in Germany and bought into a small Gdynia computer business that somebody else was already running, and that the company passed into his hands over the following years. Polish Wikipedia asserts both versions in two different articles. He decided early that it would stop shifting hardware and write software instead, and spun the distribution side off into a separate firm, the Polish ComputerLand, a different company from the American franchise chain that shares the name. The two went their own ways in 1994.

~ the record ~

~ the contract of the century ~

On 10 October 1997 Prokom signed with ZUS, the Polish social insurance institution, to design and build the Kompleksowy System Informatyczny: the computer system that would hold the contribution record of every working person in the country. The press called it the contract of the century. Reported values differ, 703 million zloty in one account and 638 million in another, and by 2006 the services alone were said to have passed 700 million with the hardware taking the whole thing well over a billion. The company floated on the Warsaw exchange four months after signing, on 10 February 1998, raising over 200 million zloty.

It did not stay clean. The supreme audit office examined the deal in 1998 and found that an annex signed under a new ZUS president had changed the concept so thoroughly that a fresh tender should have been held. It also found that Prokom had counted the technical capacity of its whole group as its own, and that the commission should have rejected the bid it accepted. One official admitted the team did not know whether the contract would be worth a hundred million dollars or two hundred. The findings reached parliament in March 2000. The system was built anyway, and ZUS was still signing supplementary agreements with Prokom in December 2007, three months before the company ceased to exist.

~ how the smaller one won ~

The ending is a chain of absorptions that mostly reverses the order you would expect. Prokom bought into Softbank, the main supplier of software to Polish banks, taking ten percent in 2000 and control in 2002. By 2006 it held around thirty-five percent. Then Asseco Poland merged into Softbank rather than the other way around, registered on 4 January 2007, and the surviving company kept the Asseco name and moved its seat to Rzeszow that April. So by the time Asseco came for Prokom, the buyer was legally the company Prokom had already bought into.

The offer went public on 12 September 2007 at 700 million zloty for the Krauze block, was cut to 580 million a week later, and was signed as a conditional sale on 29 September. Krauze stopped being chief executive on 2 October and Adam Goral of Asseco took that job at both companies at once. The shareholder meetings of 20 February 2008 set the exchange at 1.82 Asseco shares for each Prokom share, which works out to 19,847,748 new shares for the holders who were not Asseco already. Krauze's own holding company took cash. Everyone else took paper in the buyer.

~ five championships and a building site ~

For most Poles the name meant basketball. Prokom sponsored the Sopot club from the late 1990s and it played as Prokom Trefl Sopot, winning the Polish championship five seasons running from 2004 to 2008. The name outlasted the company by five seasons in the shirt, through Asseco Prokom Sopot and then Asseco Prokom Gdynia, and was dropped before 2013/14.

prokom.pl does still answer. Behind it sits a hosting company's placeholder, 9,722 bytes, headed Strona w budowie, last modified in May 2021 and carrying an advertisement for the host along the bottom. The www form of the name resolves to nothing. For a business whose product was keeping the records of the Polish state, the ending is a default template left unedited for five years, with nobody around to mind.

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