ZOO Digital turns to wife of CEO after orders set back
ZOO Digital Group has arranged a loan from the wife of its chief executive after experiencing a fall in orders which will see it make a loss this year.
The Sheffield-based group, which produces software used by companies in DVD and Blu-ray production, has cut costs including making staff redundant after a large Blu-ray production client postponed several projects.
It says it expects to make a pre-tax loss of between £700,000 and £800,000 in the year to March 31 on turnover which will fall to around £7m for the year.
ZOO has turned to Sara Green, wife of its chief executive Dr Stuart Green for a standby loan of up to £200,000 to provide it with the necessary working capital headroom.
The loan will have interest of 5.5% above the Royal Bank of Scotland base rate and will be repaid by March 31, 2014.
The fall in orders is a set back for ZOO, which only said in November it was “cautiously optimistic” about the trading outlook after seeing half year revenues grow 5% as the company returned to pre-tax profit for the first half of the year on the back of a recovering home entertainment market.
The company turned a half-year pre-tax loss of $1.3m (£817,000) in 2011 into a profit of $30,000 (£18,900) for the six months to the end of September.
ZOO said it has made progress to diversify revenue streams and it continues to increase its focus on licensing of workflow management and productivity software.
