Em@iler drags down Amstrad

Amstrad recorded a loss of 960,000 compared with a profit of 13.1m a year ago. The results contained a full-year operating loss of 5m in connection with Amserve. The company has only managed to sell a lower-than-expected 92,000 of the combined email, fax and phone devices.

Amstrad is investing a further 12m in the joint venture with Dixons but the electrical retailer will not be injecting any fresh funds into the business. Amstrad has net assets of 27.0m, of which 26.9m is cash. The company claims that strong Set Top Box (STB) sales to BSkyB have offset the loss-making Amserve.

The em@iler, a desktop phone with QWERTY keyboard and fax and email capability, was launched in March last year and was put on sale for around 80. Amserve intended to exploit advertising opportunities on the device to increase revenue and to take on interactive television manufacturers in targeting UK households seeking to use email in home devices.

However, the company is still some way short of its original target of shipping one million em@ilers by next summer.

Mr Sugar was also forced to resort to unorthodox marketing methods earlier this year. In order to hit back at claims in The Independent that it was a “techno-flop” in May, he requested that users of the device e-mail comments of support directly to the journalist responsible. Unfortunately, some of the comments were not as complimentary as Sugar had hoped, and only 1.5% of the user base bothered.