Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

First quarter revenues to the end of March were 23 per cent ahead year-on-year to £3.9 million and the company has a rock-like balance sheet with £43m cash.

It has already enhanced its distribution capabilities in North America by establishing a direct sales presence in Canada, previously serviced from the US, and by building an inside sales team at its Boston office.

It has also reinforced its business development team to forge new partnerships globally.

CEO Alex van Someren said: “The outlook for the year remains positive. We anticipate further growth during the remainder of the year as a result of our investments in people and products. We set out to make the company profitable in 2004 and achieved this for the last three quarters and also for the full year following a reorganisation in the first quarter.

“We intend to continue to be profitable but we also wish to grow our sales revenues: the first quarter of 2005 shows the profitable trend continuing and has yielded an operating profit of £0.2 million. In addition, we continue to generate cash and have thereby increased the cash balance to £42.8m.”

van Someren said that since the start of the year several high profile announcements had been made by companies such as ChoicePoint, LexisNexis and Time Warner, all required to publicly disclose the loss of confidential data due to theft of ‘data at rest’.

nCipher’s SecureDB database encryption solution addresses this problem by providing additional levels of access control and selective encryption of only the truly sensitive information directly within the database itself.

Since the end of the quarter, nCipher has received its first order for SecureDB from a foreign government customer.