Earlier this afternoon, HEXUS started receiving an escalating number of suggestions, from multiple sources, that another one of the few home-grown, major PC manufacturers left standing in the UK, Evesham Technology, was believed to be in a dire financial crisis and had already entered into some kind of voluntary liquidation.
As HEXUS is very close to the UK IT channel, we’re very often the first publication to hear about such goings on - some times they're rumours, other times they turn out to be hard facts.
HEXUS is also very often the first publication that's cares enough about the interests of its readers to quickly publish such stories when we believe or know them to be true. This, to help prevent the HEXUS readership from ending up out of pocket in any way.
Yet HEXUS also recognises its responsibility to any company involved and, very importantly, the employees of these companies, to do our best to diligently check all the facts we can, so that no company is misrepresented. What we're simply not willing to do is publish disinformation that might risk forcing a company over a precipice.
In mid-March of this year, HEXUS investigated the facts relating to rumours we'd heard about the removal of certain credit insurance to companies that supply Evesham.
At that time, we spoke with the company's founder and CEO Richard Austin, who gave a detailed explanation of the background and emailed us a formal statement.
The company had cash in the bank and the changes did not materially affect its ability to continuing trading successfully. We saw no justification in further fuelling the rumour-mill, so decided that it would be inappropriate to publish anything that might cause unwarranted harm to Evesham.
Today, we once again made direct contact with Richard Austin and found him insisting that the latest rumours were not true.
Richard advised that Evesham had not entered into any kind of liquidation, voluntary or otherwise, and that no other financial agreement relating to the acquisition of Evesham had been finalised.
Richard did agree that it was true to say that many companies the size of Evesham often considered corporate acquisitions, and that while it was also true to say that Evesham was considering a significant business arrangement with another company, no such deal had yet been done.
Mr. Austin has assured us that when he knew more we would know more, so watch this space.
In recent months, some of Evesham’s competitors have also been subject to the grinders in the rumour mill, yet when HEXUS investigated the detail of the matter, we found that the rumours were some way from the truth. In one instance, we discovered that a particular competitor of Evesham's had come to financial arrangements which arguably made it one of the strongest propositions to do business with.
HEXUS doesn’t publish smoke without fire. Our track record speaks for itself when it comes to such matters, despite what sometimes seem to be denials engineered to mislead. We don’t reckon that is the case in this instance but we’re keen to know your take on this interesting posting in the HEXUS.community, when HEXUS responsibly broke the news that Watford Computers was in trouble.
Times remain pretty tough in the UK IT channel. Our insight gives rise to the opinion that very large parts of the channel are hardly innovative thinkers. Few do anything that is creative or usefully proactive to stimulate the development of their businesses. So, we take an especially dim view of the dissemination of untruths that will harm the livelihoods of rivals and their employees and families. Such actions for short-term commercial advantage are an especially ugly tactic.
