SmartPros' Wholly-Owned Subsidiary Skye Multimedia Sells Some of Its Assets as Part of Its "Back-to-Basics" Plan
January 13 2015 - 4:01PM
SmartPros Ltd. (Nasdaq:SPRO), a leader in the field of accredited
professional education and corporate training, today releases the
following information regarding its "Back to Basics" plan.
Allen Greene, SmartPros' Chairman and CEO stated:
As outlined in our June 16, 2014 press release regarding
operational changes, SmartPros has implemented its "Back-to-Basics"
plan which includes: reducing staffing in certain areas; closing,
selling or reducing certain verticals of our business; and
re-purposing resources to areas of our business that we believe
will contribute the most towards our profitability and future
growth.
Over the past six months we have managed the Company's
operations to improve our profit margins and our overall
profitability. In this regard, the following steps have been
taken:
- Our wholly-owned subsidiary, Skye Multimedia Ltd., which served
as our high-end custom content development channel, sold some of
its assets including its 50% interest in iReflect;
- We have discontinued our custom ethics consulting business as
of December 31, 2014;
- We have reduced in the latter part of 2014 and plan on reducing
in 2015 the number of live events managed by our Executive
Enterprise Institute (EEI) division;
- We reduced overhead related to development; and
- We reduced expenses related to certain large customer accounts
as of the beginning of this year in relationship to reduced
business with those customers.
Although these changes will decrease revenues, we are focusing
our attention on products with higher returns including our
accounting subscriptions, CPE Administration services and licensing
of our software products. We believe these changes will help to
generate long term profits for the Company and we expect to see the
positive effect of those in 2015.
In addition, we are seeing new opportunities as companies are
being forced to move away from common open-source Learning
Management Systems (LMS) for compliance and security reasons. Our
proprietary LMS is not built on open source code, putting us in a
position to meet the needs of companies looking for a compliant
solution. As such, we have recently signed several new firms to
multi-year contracts for our LMS and are renewing an existing
contract for our Audit Management System. These multi-year
contracts are typically larger than our average sale in other areas
of the company.
In line with what we have previously noted, we have expanded our
sales force as well as hired a lead generation firm and are
increasing direct marketing activities. As the sales cycle
for our products can be long, we expect to see the benefit of these
changes take hold as we progress through 2015.
Some of these changes will impact our fourth quarter 2014
numbers due to the write down of goodwill and possibly other
charges related to the steps we have taken.
About SmartPros
Founded in 1981, SmartPros Ltd. is an industry leader in the
field of accredited professional education and corporate training.
Its products and services are primarily focused in the accredited
professional areas of corporate accounting, financial management,
public accounting, governmental and not-for-profit accounting,
financial services, banking, engineering, legal, ethics and
compliance, and information technology. SmartPros is a leading
provider of professional education products to Fortune 500
companies, as well as the major firms and associations in each of
its professional markets. SmartPros provides education and content
publishing and development services in a variety of media including
Web, CD-ROM, video and live seminars and events. Our subscription
libraries feature hundreds of course titles and 2,800+ hours of
accredited education. SmartPros' eCampus™ Learning Management
System (LMS) offers enterprise distribution and administration of
education content and information for enterprise clients and
association partners. In addition, SmartPros produces a popular
news and information portal for accounting and finance
professionals serving more than one million ads and distributing
more than 200,000 subscriber email newsletters each month.
SmartPros' network of Web sites averages more than 1 million
monthly visits, serving a user base of more than 1.5 million
profiled members. Visit: www.smartpros.com.
Safe Harbor Statement
Statements in this press release that are not statements of
historical or current fact constitute "forward-looking statements"
within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and
Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These
forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties,
including activities, events or developments, that the Company
expects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future.
In addition to statements that explicitly describe these risks and
uncertainties, readers are urged to consider statements that
contain terms such as "believes," "belief," "expects," "expect,"
"intends," "intend," "anticipate," "anticipates," "plans," "plan,"
to be uncertain and forward-looking. The forward-looking statements
contained herein are subject to other risks and uncertainties that
are described from time to time in the Company's filings with
Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as the following
risks: that our back to basics efforts will not result in
increased profitability as anticipated.
CONTACT: SmartPros Ltd
Shane Gillispie, VP Marketing Services & eCommerce
914-829-4974 - shanegillispie@smartpros.com
Spero Therapeutics (NASDAQ:SPRO)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Spero Therapeutics (NASDAQ:SPRO)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024