Conject “challenged”

According to its 2011 annual report and accounts, Conject Ltd (the UK-based SaaS collaboration and project control vendor formerly known as BIW Technologies) found 2011 “challenging.” Its report, filed at Companies House in October 2012, echoes almost word for word what it said in 2010, saying:

“The continuing global economic malaise severely impacted funding for private sector developments and the withdrawal of funding for public works projects (as part of the UK government’s debt-reduction measures) resulted in challenging trading conditions. Despite this, the company’s revenues amounted to £4.57m for the period, clearly demonstrating the strength of the SaaS business model.”

To put this into context, in 2010 (see post) Conject reported revenues of c £5.27m (after adjustment to account for 15-month reporting period), so turnover was down around 13%. This marks a turning point in the fortunes of the UK-based AEC collaboration vendors as it would appear that Conject has fallen behind rival 4Projects in terms of turnover (blog post to follow on that company’s results for the year to March 2012). Unlike 4Projects, the Conject UK operation has not been consistently profitable and in 2011 it reported an increased operating loss (pre-tax) of £563k, up from c £112k (adjusted) in 2010. The order book at the year end remained pretty stable at £8.12m, down slightly from the £8.3m Conject reported a year earlier. According to a trading update in September (post), the Munich, Germany-based Conject group was finding 2012 a better year, talking of “a 50% increase in new contract awards in the first 8 months of the year, compared to 2011,” though it is unclear if this boost also included the performance of the UK-based business.

[Note: This blog post has been somewhat delayed; I tried to get some comment from Conject CEO Colin Smith on these figures (and on the performance of the Conject group as a whole), but Christmas and travelling meant we kept missing each other. With luck, we will get to talk very shortly.]

Conject looking for new CTO?

I understand that Andrew Wainwright, appointed Conject’s chief technology officer in June 2012 (post), has left the company after five months due to personal matters outside of work. I met Andrew briefly again at the recent COMIT “Building Information Mobility” conference (post), and he was talking enthusiastically about Conject’s BIM plans and I was looking forward to announcements in this respect (particularly as the company has been lagging behind vendors such as Asite and 4Projects in delivering BIM-related functionality – see recent post on 4Projects BIM research).