A recent aquisition for Intelliplus Group plc and new contracts for this company are coming in thick and fast. Result - share price is consistently heading north - Up 46% since 1/10. Perhaps one to quietly be a ten bagger over the next few months. DYOR

LOL

Good news:

Eckoh today announced that it has been re-appointed by William Hill to provide its automated horse racing commentary and results service. The new contract, which runs until 2010, follows Eckoh's successful operation of the service since its launch in 2002.

The service provides callers with real-time access to live horse racing commentary and results across leading UK and Irish racecourses, as well as many greyhound tracks and meetings. The service also allows callers wishing to place a bet to be prioritised and connected directly through to a contact centre agent and then to be re-connected to the automated service.

All calls to the service are hosted on Eckoh's highly resilient self-service platform, which is capable of handling over 650,000 calls per hour and 8,000 calls concurrently. The scalability of Eckoh's platform continues to be of crucial importance to William Hill during busy racing periods, when concurrent numbers of callers to the service can reach several thousand.

Mike Grenham, Head of Sports Information at William Hill, said: 'Over the past five years, Eckoh has worked with us to establish the industry's premier commentary and results service. We're confident that by re-appointing them, we will maintain access not only to their exceptionally robust and reliable capability, but also to their continued service innovation, which will ensure that we continue to enhance the betting experience we provide to our customers.'

Jim Hennigan, Executive Director at Eckoh, added: 'This is one of the most prestigious and sought after contracts in this highly competitive marketplace and we're naturally pleased that William Hill has given Eckoh such a vote of confidence in our performance and selected us to be their partner into the next decade.'

Combustable Investor - 22 Jul'07 - 21:25 - 4727 of 4730


dont read the press myself

GB904150 - 23 Jul'07 - 22:14 - 4728 of 4730


Hi all,

I posted this on another site but thought it might be of interest over here. Would be interested to hear people's views:

IMO the two crucial things in understandings ECK's valuation are the current balance sheet and forward cash flow.

I may be labouring the point on this, but bolstering the balance sheet is:

BALANCE SHEET
7.6m cash
2.0m short term investments
4.7m outstanding loan from Symphony
- 1.5m Dec 07
- 0.5m in June 08
- 1.0m in June 09
- 1.7m in June 10

Current market cap less than 18m. It would be foolish to suggest the SP won't go lower, but it is logical that the SP will be underpinned by its strong balance sheet.

At a certain point cash rich companies with profit making businesses become very attractive for takeovers, whether that be by a competitor, private equity or MBO. That isn't my reason for buying ECK, but it does give some downside protection and ensure the price is more likely to double than to halve.

CASHFLOW
Now this is where me and Oracle disagree

Op profit/(loss) before intangible asset amortisation/exceptionals 574
Op (loss)/profit (310)

Provisions for liabilities and charges (516)

Exceptionals are one off costs that cover restructuring (splitting the business takes considerable time/effort), ICSTIS costs and the actual provision for the fine.

After exceptionals the op loss is 310k but total amortisation+exceptionals amout to 884k. Amortisation will likely be lower next year, ICSTIS fine was less than provisioned for and currently no restructuring is necessary.

Eckoh are cashflow positive after allowing for exceptionals. Those exceptionals in this case produced 11m (Symphony) for the group, the majority of which was returned to shareholders.

So the balance sheet lends support to the current SP at this level to those investors who understand it. My view is that the SP is oversold - it may become more so due to the negative publicity. Unfortunately, the public and a lot of investors don't understand the role of broadcasters; productions co's; telecoms providers in the whole 'scandal'. They tar all with the same brush and consider all of them to be affected by each mention of each ruling.

e.g. The recent BBC announcement having a knock on effect. OFCOMs rulings pounced on by the press.

Shares get overbought and oversold. They are primarily a function of supply and demand. PIs have got itchy feet over Eckoh due to negative press. A falling SP undermines confidence further and causes people to worry there are other problems they aren't aware of.

Things may get worse before they get better - but you can only invest when you feel the upside potential significantly outweighs the downside, which with Eckoh I still believe to be the case.

IMO, the current weakness in ECK's SP can be attributed almost entirely to uncertainty over cashflow in 2008, in light of reduced IVR revenues. I wrote a post over on iii which gave some of my projections for 2008 T/O and what effect that might have on operating profits.

Given that the current businesses are valued at only a few m combined it still would seem sensible for Eckoh to sell off Connection makers asap if only to convince the market of their value and in doing so, realise some value for shareholders.

When a company's SP looks as weak and unsupported as ECK's, investors will invariably sit on the sidelines until they see some strength/recovery before committing a large chunk of cash. Realistically, I think we will need to see CMs being sold, director buying or a statement on trading before we see that support.

That said, at these levels Eckoh is very cheap imho, so not a bad time to accumulate.

Good investing :)

Thanks moneyman

Starting to take a serious look here. Credit Agri have bought in and maybe that overhang was cleared today. Level 2 is strong at 5 v 2

Is this the turn ?

National Rail Enquiries, Eckoh and BT win "Best Use of Technology Partnership" at CCA awards 2007 07/11/07
TrainTracker, the automated telephone enquiry service which uses advanced speech recognition to provide real time travel information to UK rail travellers, is continuing its run of award success. National Rail Enquiries, along with TrainTrackers creators, BT and Eckoh, were awarded Best Use of Technology Partnership in the Customer Contact Associations Excellence Awards ceremony in Edinburgh for the delivery and ongoing enhancement of TrainTracker, which now handles more than 400,000 passenger calls per month.

TrainTracker (0871 200 4950) was first launched in 2005, to provide information about direct train services for travel on the day of the call. In 2006 it was significantly enhanced, allowing callers to access real-time information for any UK mainland train journey up to three months in advance and to plan complex journeys involving multiple changes and transfers to and via other modes of public transport.

TrainTracker is a vital part of the multi-channel service strategy were pursuing to improve passenger access to information, says National Rail Enquiries CEO, Chris Scoggins. It succeeds largely because of its ability to scale to demand; during times of severe rail service disruption TrainTracker has handled up to 50,000 calls a day without faltering. That means our customers can always count on immediate, around the clock access to real-time information, regardless of when they call.

TrainTracker was developed by BT & Eckoh who, since 2003, have worked in a strategic alliance to address the growing demand for speech based self service contact centre solutions in business and government. Since then the alliance has delivered a series of ground breaking services to over 25 leading organisations, generating more than 55 million minutes of self service transactions.

The creation of TrainTracker for National Rail Enquiries is one of our most innovative projects to date, says Eckohs Executive Director Jim Hennigan. Our clients determination to revolutionise the way in which information is disseminated to travellers gave us the freedom to deliver automated speech on a scale never before seen in the UK.

National Rail Enquiries has one of the UKs busiest customer information services receiving more than 23 million telephone enquiries a year; TrainTracker now handles 17% of those enquiries. TrainTracker was also one of the first automated services to feature personalisation. Its built in intelligence allows it to recognise callers and anticipate their requests. If a customer calls in the morning to request departure times from London to Edinburgh, it will remember their request and offer them the return leg of that journey if they call back later that same day. Customers can also save planned journeys and retrieve them on the day of travel to check the real-time running information.

Ian Cunningham, general manager, transport and logistics, BT Global Services UK, commented: TrainTracker is a great example of how the automated information services can work in a way that benefits both the customer and the information provider. Consumers are increasingly happy to self-serve for requests such as transport information where the advice they need is generally not too complex. And for businesses, this can reduce pressure on their call centres and allow employees to focus on customers that need more tailored advice. BT's focus is on understanding and addressing the key issues within the industry and working with customers such as ATOC to develop solutions to address them. The challenge here was to always ensure that customers can access the information they need quickly and easily and TrainTracker does just that.

TrainTracker has enjoyed a run of award success. Shortly after its launch in 2005 it was named Product of the Year in the European Contact Centre Awards and, earlier this year, won the Innovation of the Year award at the Transport Innovations event in Birmingham for its advanced journey planning capability.

Credit Agricole again buying and today it seems as though someone is buying 250K chunks.

This could be interesting:

Eckoh said it has received preliminary approaches from more than one party regarding 'various proposed corporate transactions', adding that certain of these may lead to an offer being made for the company.

The telecoms service provider said discussions are ongoing and at an early stage, highlighting there is no certainty an offer will be made.

Well it's been a quiet 18 months but perhaps things are on the turn:

Speech recognition services specialist Eckoh will post a full year profit after a strong improvement in performance. The firm said it had also clinched a three year contract with Capita Group Plc and Intelecom UK to provide an automated speech service for recording the hours and expenses of up to 35,000 temporary Census staff.

The firm said the good operational progress stated in the interim results of 10th November continued into the second half of the year. For the full year 2008-09, the adjusted loss suffered in 2007-08 of 1.6m has been converted into an adjusted profit that will be in line with market expectations.

This strong improvement in performance is primarily as a result of growth within the Speech Solutions division, an improvement in margins and a reduction of around 25% in administrative expenses following the reorganisation programme instigated at the beginning of 2008. Exceptional costs of around 1m will be reported which largely relate to the settlement of a legal issue with Channel 4, but cash balances in the Group remain in excess of 5m.

The trading statement today was very positive.

As well as the 5.0m in cash ECK are still to receive 2.7m from the sale of Symphony Telecom in June 2009 and June 2010, plus 1,2m from the sale of connections by the end of this year. Which would be 9.0m cash against a market value of only 12.0m.

I was a bit slow off the mark this morning, but hoping these will stay under the rador a bit longer, so I can build a worthwhile holding.

Any more thoughts out there on this one, thinking of getting in at the minute?