Telesens KSCL

~ the goodbye ~

Every phone call anyone makes has to be turned into a number on a bill, and somebody writes the software that does it. Telesens was founded in Cologne in 1995 by Genadi Man to do exactly that, selling billing systems to telephone operators at the moment when the European telecoms market was being deregulated and every new entrant needed a way to charge people. It was dull, necessary work, and around 2000 the market briefly priced dull and necessary like a growth stock.

It listed on the Neuer Markt in March 2000, the German growth exchange that functioned as the local version of the dot-com boom and collapsed on roughly the same schedule. Deutsche Telekom ended up holding 25.9 percent indirectly, which for a company selling billing software to carriers was either an endorsement or a conflict depending on which carrier you asked. The name picked up its second half in 2000, when the Cologne company took over a Scottish business called KSCL and became TelesensKSCL AG.

The numbers that killed it are in the company's own ad hoc disclosure of 12 June 2002. Preliminary US GAAP figures for 2001 showed revenue of about 82 million euros and a net loss of about 245 million, a loss three times the size of the business, most of it write-downs on goodwill from companies it had bought with boom-era paper. The board noted that its German statutory accounts might diverge sharply from these figures, particularly if insolvency proceedings were opened. Six days later they were.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the bank froze the account ~

On 31 May 2002 the company disclosed that the Royal Bank of Scotland had judged its collateral insufficient and blocked a money transfer out of its Scottish subsidiary. For a group running on borrowed working capital that was decisive, and the sequence afterward took eighteen days. In early June the shares moved off the Neuer Markt down to the Geregelter Markt, the segment with the lighter reporting requirements.

On 18 June 2002 the board applied to the Amtsgericht Köln to open insolvency proceedings, citing an inability to pay. Around a hundred people at the Cologne site were affected. Hans-Gerd Jauch of the Cologne firm Görg was appointed to administer it, under file number 75 IN 358/02, and the court opened the proceedings with effect from 1 September 2002. The German press reported liabilities of about 69 million euros.

~ the scottish half ~

The KSCL side of the name has a paper trail in the Scottish register that ran on long after Cologne was finished with it. Companies House still carries TelesensKSCL (Holdings) Limited, registration SC182333, and its list of former names reads like a time-lapse of the whole era. It was incorporated on 22 January 1998 as DMWS 323 Limited, a shelf company waiting to be bought. That September it became Kingston SCL (Holdings) Limited. It was renamed again in November 1999 to KSCL (Holdings) Limited, and once more on 8 November 2000 to TelesensKSCL (Holdings) Limited.

Four names in under three years, the last one taken in November 2000, eight months after the Neuer Markt had already peaked. The registered office on the final record is care of Deloitte & Touche in Glasgow, an insolvency practitioner's address rather than a place of business. It was finally dissolved on 3 May 2010, almost eight years after the Cologne court had finished with the parent.

~ the cologne petition ~

German insolvency has two dates and sources pick whichever one suits them, so this grave uses both. The 18 June 2002 petition is the day the company stopped being a going concern and the day the trade press reported it. The 1 September opening is the formal start of proceedings, and it is the date the German Wikipedia leads with, which is why you will see 2002 split between June and September depending on where you read about it. Neither is wrong.

Turkey went through the same build-out without a listed company attached to it. Turkish GSM was growing explosively through exactly these years, and the billing systems behind it were being bought or built by somebody, generally quietly. The Telesens kind of company is invisible from the customer side by design. You only find out one existed when the court file turns up.

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