office@pcreport.eunet.ro COMPANY PROFILE A. IDENTIFICATION: Company name: HotSoft Ltd. Location: ROMANIA, Tirgu-Mures, T. Vladimirescu 63/1 Established: 24 March 1992 Current activity: Production and services in the following domains - Publishing House 75% of total sales - Software Development 15% of total sales - Software Distribution 10% of total sales Associates / Owners The owners of the company are seven professionals, graduated engineers and mathematicians, between 30 and 40 years old, specialists in IT (Information Technology) and friends. Management Position, Name, Age, Background, Experience, Company, Years General Director, Romulus Maier, 34, Electrical engineer, Chief editor, Micro-ATCI ltd., 1990- 1992 Technical Director, Adrian Pop, 34, Computer science engineer, Lecturer, Technical University,1991- 1994 Chief Editor, Mircea Sarbu, 34, Mathematics IT, Project Manager, Infomures SA, 1989- 1992 Personnel The permanent staff consists of 10 persons and there are 10 regular co-operators, most of them employed by Tg.Mures Technical University, the Architecture Design Institute and High Schools. All this persons are highly skilled professionals and hard workers. The motivation is high because each person has his or her self development possibilities, there is a pleasant atmosphere and good working conditions. There are some common characteristics they have: ambition, excellence seeking and the capability to make personal sacrifices (like spending fewer hours with the family) for the sake of the company. Technology The company owns 10 computers (9 PCs - 386s and 486s and a Macintosh LCIII), networked; total hard disk capacity 2.5 GB; 2 laserjet printers, 1 matrix printer, 1 A4 colour scanner, 1 fast modem; Windows for Workgroups, UNIX - Linux. B. PRODUCTS AND CLIENTS B1. Publishing house The company publishes two computers magazines : "PC REPORT", a 64 -72 pages monthly magazine in tabloid format (A3), issue size 12,000 and "OPEN Tehnologia Informa>iei " (OPEN Information Technology) , a 2-month period magazine of 60-100 pages, in A4 format, issue size 5000 (pilot). PC REPORT contains five main sections: - NEWS - company presentations, market information - COVER-STORY - technologies - WORKSHOP - practice, programming, solutions - SUPPLEMENT on an important theme - MAC REPORT - a section for Apple products users Target clients: - computer users at a normal to professional skills level - students in IT sciences - managers in computer-related businesses OPEN IT has been firstly issued in May 1994. Its design and printing quality are intended to be the best on the Romanian market. This year the magazine will be issued four times, experimenting the proper structure and layout in order to become a monthly magazine in 1995. Target clients: - highly skilled professionals, both in technical and marketing jobs in IT businesses. The both magazines focus on offering the hottest and most valuable information to the Romanian readers. This effort is also meant for imposing a high educational level and professionalism in Romanian IT. The advertising space in the two magazines is sold to about 60 companies, most of them dealers and distributors of big foreign hardware and software producers. Five of the most important customers for advertising are: - OMNILOGIC (Unique Novell distributor in Romania, authorised dealer for Seagate, Western Digital, 3Com, Digital and others) - SOFT-TRONIK (Soft-tronik-Germany distributor, authorised dealer for HP, SCO, 3Com, Seikosha and others) - COMPAQ - FORTE (Microsoft) - A&C Intl. (Autodesk, CALCOMP) B2. Software development The company has produced and launched on the market two software products: KeyMap and ARCADE. KeyMap is a software for Windows offering an easy and rapid way to map any character on codepage 1250 to any key, thus providing a valuable facility to work with any East European language. The package contains also 60 True Type fonts. It is a very useful tool for any text processor and DTP package working in Windows environment. ARCADE is a software for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, written for AutoCAD R12 environment. It is oriented on solid shapes modelling, allowing intelligent plane transpositions and basic economic calculus. It is endowed with view generating functions (horizontal and vertical cross sections), providing perspective and export capabilities to animation software (3D Studio) It is important to note that Hot Soft has been appointed as an AutoCAD authorised developer. Other fields the company has developed software in are: - Control Engineering applications development (two controlling systems: one for a stocking knitting machine, another for a PC-based equipment for flame-based cutting of sheet iron, following a given contour.) - UNIX environment administration and applications It is interesting to notice that about 76% of the sales come from 20 % of the customers. C. COMPETITORS C.1. Publishing All the important competitors are joint ventures of Romanian companies and foreign publishers. Here is a list of details about them: Company, Foreign partner, Magazine name, Issue size, Readers - Communication Publishing Group Bucharest, IDG - USA, PC WORLD Romania, 15,000 Beginners - COMPUTER WORLD Romania, , , , 15,000 Managers - Badescu Publishing Brasov, Vogel Verlag - Germany, CHIP, 7,000, Computer users As it might be noticed, the only magazine that has a market segment overlapping with PC REPORT is CHIP. But actually there is a competition in selling advertising space, to finance the magazine. The main advantages that PC REPORT and OPEN IT offer their readers and customers, compared to the competitorst magazines are: - regular issues - a good reputation among professionals - a higher quality both of the contents, DTP and printing (for similar products) - more information for lower price (value for money) - smaller advertising fees C.2. Software development - For key mapping software, there exists another Romanian producer, MTIL ROM, but their product is not largely sold because of the complete lack of advertising and poor presentation. - For ARCADE there is no Romanian competition. The foreign companies producing competitive software in this field are ARCHITRION (France) and SOFTDESK (USA). The main advantages KeyMap offers the client are: - easy usage - total flexibility - friendly user interface - a better price-performances report. The main advantages ARCADE offers the client are: - a much lower price than the specialised western products (ten times lower) - higher flexibility -it can be used to design easily buildings from bungalows to cathedrals - freedom to design - it doesn't restrict the designers imagination; he or she can create any sorts of objects according to the imagination, not only using pre-established elements D. PROMOTION Besides the nice appearance of the products, Hot Soft is promoting the sales and the company image by: - participating to exhibitions, fairs, seminars, conferences - oferring free subscribtions to High Schools - awarding the winners of the students contests in IT - keeping the price constant for those who subscribe to the magazines (in a country with an official inflation rate of 320% in 1993) E. FIGURES The turnover and the profit of the company in 1992, 1993 and the forecast for 1994: Figure, 1992, 1993*, 1994** Turnover, $8,500, $86,500, $120,000 Profit, $3,000, $18,000, $20,000 Profit rate, 35.3%, 20,8%, 16.6% * In April 1993 the company started paying income taxes ** The figures for 1994 are calculated at the official exchange rate in May 1994 (1,700 lei/$)