Vol. 6, No. 9, September 1995

Longtime industry innovator sold to Norwegian parent of Atex

Late August brought further consolidation of the newspaper systems supplier industry as Sysdeco Group AS of Norway purchased Dewar Information Systems Corp. for $1.5 million to $2 million.

Sysdeco, you may remember, owns 51 percent of Atex Publishing Systems Corp., a company that has met with success in recent months integrating DewarView, Dewar Information’s lead product. Sysdeco says it will continue to license DewarView to other companies to resell.

Dewar Information, which had marked its 20th anniversary shortly before it was sold, is undoubtedly worth much more than Sysdeco paid for it. Sysdeco said Dewar Information’s 1994 revenues were $4.5 million.

The sale price reflects the fact that the company was carrying a "certain amount of debt," and the deal provided what is probably a lucrative personal services contract for its founder and sole owner, C.E. Steuart Dewar.

"Steuart will have a lot to contribute to Sysdeco Media in its editorial strategy," said J. Marlow Einlund, the head of the Norwegian company’s U.S. efforts.

Sysdeco not only has controlling ownership of Atex, it also owns SyPress Oy, the Finnish creator of the Enterprise classified system sold by Atex and the remnants of the European front-end suppler, Comtec.

Inside, we detail the deal under which Dewar will consult for Sysdeco and will be offered a seat on the Sysdeco Inc. board.

"This is the person who speaks on behalf of the newspaper market," Einlund said of Dewar.

Sysdeco has always wanted control of the editorial front-end it sells, he said.

"From the very beginning, we knew we needed one good established editorial system and one good established classified system," Einlund said. The acquisitions of Dewar and SyPress achieve this goal.

With the merger of Autologic into Information International Inc. (see The Cole Papers, August 1995) and the closure of Hyphen Inc., the newspaper supplier industry is certainly retrenching, though this latest event may affect only a few individuals.

Newsprint prices may be causing some of this consolidation, but most of it is still the fallout from the publishing systems industry’s shift from home-grown, proprietary systems to those based on readily available hardware and mostly off-the-shelf software.

The clear winner here is Dewar himself; he has liquidated his company at a time when there probably aren't a lot of buyers for such enterprises. And he gets the opportunity to concentrate on his two strengths -- programming and customer relations.

This deal seems to have gone down well, too.

"Everybody is happy, which wasn't the way it was with Atex," said Einlund, referring to the failed attempt of the then-incumbent Atex management to strike another deal.

"It was a good deal," said Dewar.

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Oh, yes. There are still some unsettled issues regarding that silly little trade show that is always in some hot place in the summer where they talk incessantly about newspapers: