Watford Electronics

» see watfordelectronics.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Watford Electronics began in 1972 as a sole proprietorship run by two brothers, Nazir and Raza Jessa, and for its first decade it sold components and kits to hobbyists by post, against adverts in the electronics magazines. There was a shop on Cardiff Road in Watford and a catalog, and the catalog is where the business actually lived. That is an unglamorous way to start a computer company, and it worked: when the home machines arrived, the brothers already knew how to take an order from a stranger in another town.

The early eighties made them. Watford went at the BBC Micro harder than almost anyone, building the boards and disc interfaces Acorn had not put in the machine, and writing its own version of the Disc Filing System. Later it sold complete PCs under the Aries name. Growth paid for a purpose-built headquarters in Luton in 1992, taken on a twenty-five-year lease, and through the nineties the business drifted where the market drifted, out of Acorn and into PC clones and consumables. By 2001 the online arm was trading as Savastore.

It went into administration on Wednesday 7 February 2007, case 991 of 2007 in the Companies Court, with Stephen Cork of Smith & Williamson appointed. At half past three that same afternoon a statement went up on the Savastore site saying that a company called Globally Limited had purchased the business of Watford Electronics. Globally had been incorporated on 5 February, two days earlier, and its address was the Luton building Watford had been trading from all along.

~ the case file ~

~ the back pages ~

The thing people actually remember is the advert, a dense grid of part numbers and prices taking multi-page spreads in every issue of The Micro User through the middle eighties. The proposition sat in that density. Acorn sold a sealed machine with a fixed amount of memory and no disc drive, and Watford sold the sideways RAM and the drive to go with it, along with the implicit promise that your computer was not finished yet. A company like that is not in the hardware business so much as in the business of selling people the gap between what they bought and what they wanted. The July 1985 catalog sold a BBC B with the Watford DFS at £339, and the same machine loaded with every board they made at £429.

None of this reached Turkey. The BBC Micro was a British schools machine built to a British broadcaster's specification, and my own first machine was a beige PC clone with parts bought off a counter in Ankara. What carries over is the catalog habit itself. Years later my forum signature on frmtr carried a hardware list, which is the same impulse a generation down: a price list read until you know it by heart, then argued over with strangers.

~ what it actually built ~

The Watford DFS is the part worth keeping. Acorn's filing system allowed 31 files on a disc; Watford's allowed 62, by writing a second catalog into the two spare sectors of track zero and marking it with eight recognition bytes hidden in the area reserved for the disc title. Its own 1983 specification states the consequence in one flat sentence: standard DFS will not recognize the second catalogue, and will allow it to be overwritten. Half your files were invisible to any machine without a Watford ROM in it, and that machine would cheerfully write over them.

There is a better story in the shadow RAM boards. In December 1984 Acorn User reported a patent clash over sideways RAM expansion, with Aries Computers holding the patent and Watford among the companies it was pointed at. In July 1986 the same magazine reported that Watford had bought Aries Computers outright in a five-figure deal, patents included. It had purchased the patent that was aimed at it, and Aries became the brand name on its own computers for years afterward.

~ the slide ~

The directors' own account is in the administrator's proposals and it is unusually plain. The accounts for the year to 30 September 2005 went in late, on 7 November 2006, after a change of auditors at an unhelpful moment. The 2006 strategy had been to take market share, which worked, and the cost of it was margin. Trade credit insurers read the filing and cut the company's credit limits, and the cash flow went with them. The Register named Euler Trade Indemnity as leading the trimming, and did it carefully enough not to start a rout.

The numbers underneath explain why so little pressure was needed. Turnover for that year was £49.3m, up 31.3 percent, on an operating profit of £101,700, which was down almost 58 percent on the year before. Three years earlier the company had turned over £24.7m with ninety people. It had doubled the revenue in three years and halved what the revenue earned. On the Monday before the end the financial controller told The Register that business was normal and that "the rumours are not true". Raza Jessa had resigned as a director twelve days before that.

~ the wind-down ~

The administrator sold the business and its goodwill to Globally Limited for £42,000 paid at completion and £50,000 deferred, plus three percent of the following year's gross profits. The staff transferred. The stock and the book debts did not, which is the only reason unsecured creditors saw anything, and the administrator noted that the Savastore trading name did not belong to the company in the first place. Over seventy retention-of-title claims landed on the £1.4m of stock, suppliers turned up at the premises more than forty times, and because the couriers froze every delivery on the day of appointment, customers who had paid for goods that never came began filing card chargebacks against roughly £200,000 sitting with the bank.

The Register's headline two days in said £3.5m of debt. The directors' sworn statement of affairs, filed seven weeks later, put unsecured claims at £9,235,170 against £1,835,745 of realizable assets, for a deficiency of £7,399,425. Computer 2000 was the largest creditor at around £450,000. Administration turned into creditors' voluntary liquidation on 25 July 2007 and the company, by then called Digital POS Ltd, was dissolved on 26 February 2019. The shell holding the Watford Electronics name filed dormant accounts every year until 2024 and was struck off on 2 June 2026, which is the date the name itself finally stopped existing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »