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At Comshare, prosperity and Looming disaster have come and gone like the seasons.
It has been buffeted more than once in its up-and-down history as a publicly-traded computer company--caught unawares by changing market conditions in the superfluid world of high-tech. But whenever its critics proclaim it dead and prepare for the funeral, it changes its shape, springs to life and escapes.
Today the question is: Can the state's second largest computer company reinvent itself again? Or, better yet, can it become a company that doesn't need to keep reinventing itself?
The latest incarnation--marketing other companies' software whenever necessary instead of doing everything in-house--marks a full 180-degree shift for Comshare since it was founded in 1966. "We're changing our company from a technology company to a marketing company, using the best technology that exists, whether it's invented by us or by other people," says Wally Wrathall, the long-time CFO who moved up to the CEO hotseat in April.
History shows that if anyone can rebound from what must be termed a disastrous slide in the early '90s, it is Comshare, the state's second-largest computer company. Again and again, the company has either changed its target audience, its core business or how it delivers its product.
If ever the word plunge applied to share price, it applies at Comshare.
It traded on the NASDAQ exchange at 22-1/2 early in fiscal 1992, but plunged in the fourth quarter from 17 to 9-1/4. It rebounded in the second quarter of 1993 to hit 14-3/4, then fell in the fourth quarter to 5-3/4.
The price reflected a hemorrhaging balance sheet. For fiscal 1991, which ended on June 30, 1991, Comshare showed a profit of more than $10 million. The next year, the company LOST more than $13 million and lost an other $1.1 million in fiscal 1993.
In Comshare's defense, most of that $13 million loss was due to one-time accounting charges related to layoffs and the carrying value of software, but the company would have lost money regardless, and revenues, after years of steady growth, declined from $124 million to $119 million. In 1993, they fell again, to $105 million, and in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1994, they were off yet again, to $97 million.
The...