Are there any statistics showing a drop in PC buying after the tax break was abolished? I'm surprised that only 1 company seems to have been so adversely affected by the loss of the scheme

Since when was slapping together a few generic PC parts a high tech industry.

Evesham where more high tech in the 80s when they built ram packs, disk interfaces and freezeframe cartridges for 8 bit computers.

Fecking politicians

Title says it all ... RIchard Austin has foot in mouth

Aren't you Brits having a serious outbreak of foot in mouth disease? Oh, wait, that's hoof and mouth disease. Never mind.

where sprout picking and onion tying and sodding asparagus are still the best the Vale can offer, a few generic PCs are very high tech!

(Apologies to Misys, Group 4 etc!)

Is it true?

Well, let's say Evesham had experienced hugh growth instead.

Would Austin have attributed that success to his own management or some Government minister's scheme? I think we can answer that.

Perhaps he would really have said something like "....actually I'm a completely doofus, but thanks to Gordan Brown keeping HCI we made lots of money anyway and so 150 people keep their jobs, cheers Gordon"

So I suppose "It's all that Gordon Brown's fault" is either just the guy trying to protect his ego from the stark reality that the business failed and it's his fault. "It was other bigger boys, miss" Stick to the safer sand pit Mr Austin.

Of course, it could be true, but that just suggests the guy is a complete doofus for betting the entire company and losing.

Oh yeah. Did anyone forget that Evesham were spammers? No? Good.

as the advert says Priceless,very much a comment to cut out and keep Michael and so much better than the one i spent hours working on last night

FYI Carolyn all the aforementioned vegetable tasks are a hell of alot more difficult to do right than bang together a computer and i should know as i have done both

Farming on the Vale is still a big thing.. Austin decided to use a farming method by dropping the smelly stuff on his staff from a great height. For a man that wears sandles and green socks ... this too is high tech.

As for sensiblle comments from Evesham to the press , forget that from now on. Now that Ms Worth has moved on .... Eveshams press output will show the real bunch of baboons that run the place. So i think this will be the first of many cock ups to come our way.

I think we should aleast show some thought for Mr Austin ... he might be worried that he doesnt know where his next pair of sandles and Green socks are coming from, or if he can afford a racing car ... (to constantly loose races in).

Please put your Hand in your pockets to help , Austin .... he needs it.

BYKER GROVE

i have to agree with BYKER Grove,agricultural differences side i think press comments will defiantely be Worth...less now .Mr A You need a New Spin Doctor

During part of my twelve years with Evesham i was quiet involved with HCi and although Godon Brown's axing of the scheme was somewhat unexpected at that time the company was aware that it wouldn't run indefinitly and should have taken this in to account when investing in it? Another good board decision!!!

Evesham diversified very nicely thank you and in July 07 my three area's produced a turnover in excess of £838k with a potential profit on that turnover of £214k. And this was just a part of the business!

Oh and I am still waiting for someone to do the right thing and pay me and my other redudant colleagues our hard earned commission for July!! Wait for Evesham to do the right thing!?? we'll probably all die waiting.

So how can Austin blame all those redundancies on HCI? Capitalistic greed more like

By and large Evesham suffered the same fate as a number of British Builders by trying to take on the big boys at their own game. Evesham could not achieve the economies of scale that firms such as HP and Dell enjoy. This automatically put Evesham at an huge disadvantage.

Evesham should really have looked to finding a niche market for themselves where economy of scale is a less telling advantage. One thing that is shining through is that Evesham were most likely relying on HCI far more than Mr. Austin was prepared to admit. A stance that implies that Evesham were in trouble a long time ago and that HCI was possibly viewed as a white Knight to shore up an already compromised business model.

Never the less 150 jobs have been lost and yet again its the same old story of British management incompetence.

this is an extract of what I told Mr Luff .. perhaps he did not carefully read ALL of what I wrote before he wrote his letter to the PM?

" ..Yes, HCI was flawed right from the start, in it's assumption that there

is so great a "benefit" in people owning a personal computer that a

government needs to (indirectly) subsidize it. But we did not just sell

personal computers, we made them as well. Production requires a lot of

"risky" initial investment. RA obviously had made an investment decision

at that time, based on the reasonable assumption that any decrease in

the consumer market share due to saturation by "box shifters" like PC

World (or Tesco!) could be compensated for by shifting to HCI. This

assumption proved to be correct - up until the point HCI was stopped .."

IMHO (as Dougal perhaps remembers me saying from our many crew meetings) HCI was a BAD idea, and we should have moved a lot faster and a lot more agressively in response once it stopped. The problem was entirely with "management" - and that means Richard too - in not ADAPTING or EVOLVING fast enough, and in not living up to the (new) name of the company i.e. "technology" - by not DEVELOPING new audio-visual consumer products (other than the E-Box). As well as selling a complete range of home consumer electronics like Dixons Digital. After all, we couldn't be any worse than Dixons in terms of "technical support", and we had an "internet presence" and warehouse space.

Put it this way - we HAD an OPPORTUNITY. All the UK is going to go "digital television" in a few years. We already were set up in Production for connecting a PSU, DVD writer drive, and a hard disk to a computer mainboard - which could "upgrade" the video display from a DVD to HDMI, decode the DVD, and time shift record from a digital tuner. And even play PC games - if we used a "standard" mainboard and OS. But ALL we had to "satisfy" this opportunity was the "E-Box" - which was crap. Why not a full size optical drive - cheaper and more reliable? Why not enough space to put a "game quality" PCI-X video card - so "gamers" can play games in their living room? Why not a remote control built in - so it LOOKS like something you put under the telly? Why not an energy-saving on-off switch on the front and proper power management in the BIOS - so we could say how GREEN it was (unlike the el cheapo digibox recorder we also sold, that had a fan that ran ALL the time - even in standby)? Why not more than just one model?

We should have been able to source a local UK manufacturer for a range of PC cases that we designed ourselves, for a range of "E-Box" type computers, that would fit under the televisions that we assembled. We should have sold an "audio-video receiver", that would have also been designed to put under the telly, that would allow you to connect any USB MP3 player, that would connect to speakers and amplifiers that we could also assemble. We should have not given up on "production". Not when even now I STILL can't find any "convergence" of computer and "home entertainment" in Dixons Digital - yet.

However, I accept that HCI played a LARGE part in the demise of the company. We invested in a "production" capacity that in hindsight we should not have. And all Richard was doing last year was putting a positive spin on a bad situation.

I do i dont know if you were in the one before they got rid of HCI when i said the govenrment would drop it just like that because they were losing too much tax revenue in exactly the same way they had nailed a Profit sharing scheme which had been used sucessfully by my former employer

There are clearly a few hurt people here, but I would suggest there are a few that should put these events into perspective and move on with their lives. No business owes its employees a living, all it can do is try and get the big decisions right, and run the business with a wary eye on what the competition are up to.

No sane owner manager sets out to deliberately screw their business over, let alone people that have worked for him for years and still live on 'his doorstep. '

I don't know Richard particularly well, but from what I know of him, I should imagine this experience has ripped him apart.

As I said at the time, there are a myriad of pressures/reasons that the business got into the tangle that it did; some of these market dynamics it could and should have been able to foresee, and some were simply beyond its control.

Trying to be price competitive against global brands that enjoy huge component price discounts was always difficult, made even more so by local consumer migration attracted by a lower price at the point of purchase - even if the subsequent post-sales support was less than satisfactory - so much for customer loyalty? There are many who bought global brands on price that now regret their decision whenever they need engineering\technical support.

Personally, unless they make a sea-change in their business approach I see little prospect of this 'new' Evesham lasting too long.

I sincerely hope I am wrong.