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Clients in trouble? Act fast to minimise the potential impact on your business. PCA Member P&A offers a valuable professional service - free: In view of the current economic climate we thought it may be useful to send you some information in relation to the P&A Partnership's 'Creditors Meeting Service' The P&A Partnership is one of the longest established and most experienced business support practitioners in Britain - we are independent, and are focused on Turnaround, Recovery and Insolvency. The P&A Partnership have a broad range of support services relating to Insolvency, including the Creditors Meeting Service, as follows: If you receive a notice of a meeting of creditors in relation to one of your customers (i.e. one of your customers goes into some type of insolvency, be it Liquidation, Bankruptcy, etc) the P&A Partnership will act as your professional representative at that meeting Free of Charge. You simply need to send us the notification and we will process all the paperwork on your behalf. We will also attend the Creditors' Meetings either with you or on your behalf, and will provide you with a detailed report of the outcome. We are able to provide full national coverage for all UK mainland Insolvencies. There is no lower limit on the size of debt we offer this service for, instead we would decide whether it is appropriate to attend each creditors meeting on a case by case basis. In other words, if it is a relatively small debt but you want P&A to attend the creditors meeting for a specific reason this can be arranged. Finally we will provide you with updates, normally every 9 months, although this can be tailored to your specific requirements. As mentioned, the service is Free of Charge and in return we simply ask for you to support our appointment as officeholder where this is deemed appropriate. Further details of the service can be found on the P&A website at the following address: http://www.thepandapartnership.com/creditor-meetings.html If at any point in the future you would like to explore the ways in which we could assist you then please feel free to contact me on 0114 278 8868 or mobile 07824 311507 at any time. Quote the PCA when you contact me, please Paul Hughes - Credit Services Manager PaulHughes@thepandapartnership.com PC Retail sponsors PCA Conference, latest line-up includes Enta. Snow problem no problem with video conferencing The line up for the PCA Conference on 17th February is increasingly impressive, with the benefits in attending growing as every speaker or exhibitor signs up - not least with give-aways and special deals Imago will be demonstrating the benefits of videoconferencing using Sony's latest kit. These days fewer people want to travel but we all need to stay in touch; sales of videoconferencing kit are booming and margins are great - so why aren't you selling it? Intel will talk about their latest initiatives in the market, as will Autotask, who will underline the labour-saving margin-boosting advantage of their product Omega PAT isn't a name you've heard before; the only relationship to the postman of the same name is that they both really want to be helpful. Portable Appliance Testing (PAT) is something that virtually every enterprise needs to do in order to ensure they are operating within the law. Who could be better placed than the person crawling about installing a network or re-installing an upgraded computer to recommend that the customer has a proper PAT regime. There's a margin in it for you as an introducer, and potentially some PAT work as well. Samsung, although a well known name in the channel is one of the newest PCA members They'll be telling us why Faster isn't always Better Synaxon, FixItlocal & Integra seem to have a lot in common - they certainly have many members in common, however their offerings are very different, but still complimentary to each other. Resellers need all the group support and help they can get, and these organisations are committed to doing just that. ComputerAid International solves lots of problems. They clear your customers' surplus kit - ideally as part of the process of you selling new stuff - and they supply computers to technologically deprived people - mostly students in Africa. And they help us all feel good in the process. What could be better? As well as the speakers mentioned above, delegates to the conference at the Holiday Inn, Manchester Airport can network with other delegates and exhibitors during lunch and refreshment breaks. Although the event has a ticket price of £90, all PCA member enterprises can send one delegate free of charge, with subsequent delegates from the same company being charged £25. The networking dinner in the evening (£49) is informal - and not to be missed. As a result of PC Retail Sponsorship, non-members may also attend free of charge. Book here: Speakers & Exhibitors: Intel, Samsung, Sony, Synaxon, FixItLocal, Autotask, Omega PAT, ComputerAid International, Integra, Talk Internet, Solwise, VeryPC, Hitachi GST, Symantec, Acer, Widget, Kingston Technology GfK - Xmas was boom time for PC's, not so for monitors December sales are always heavily focussed on retail channels, and 2008 was no exception, with an increasingly higher share of sales occurring through the retail channels. In total 78% of total PC sales were retail channel sales, compared with 70% in November 2008, and 75% in December 2007. In recent months the growth rate of retail PCs has been slowing down, but December saw a slight increase in this, driven by mobile PCs in retail channels. Taking retail Q4 PC sales as a whole, the market increased by 22%, however the main driver to this growth in the past, Notebooks, sustained only an 11% growth during Q4 2008 (compared with Q4 2007). This left the retail PCs market in a rather exposed position - the only categories to out-grow the market were Netbooks and Tablet PCs. Netbooks have been the talk of recent months, and given an average price of approx £230, it certainly makes for a more attractive "under-the-tree" gift in comparison to the traditional Notebook retailing at around £395. December is always a quiet time for business channel sales, however sales ended the year in a positive note, with deskbound sales increasing 2%, and mobile sales increasing 7% compared to December 2007, however these growth rates are a long way from the highs seen earlier in the year.  Monitors Market Continues its Decline. Comparing 2008 to the previous year, in both volume and value, the LCD Monitor market declined 13%. December's decline of the total market in volume and value was a lot worse than the overall yearly trend - unfortunately not a fabulous end to 2008. The traditional 4:3 screen size has suffered heavily, suffering a 55% decrease in volume and a 60% decrease in value versus same month previous year. This is explainable when you consider that the standard 17" screen monitor, which accounts for 59% of the 4:3 market, dropped into the sub £100 priceband during December. With an ASP of £93.40 this was a significant £22 decrease from the same month in 2007. In the Widescreen market, big price reductions were also observed. The 18"-19" and 22" sizes, the screens with the highest sales in December, saw their ASP slashed by £23 and £31 respectively. Interestingly, the 24" Widescreens saw their ASP increase by £6, but the share of the market this size holds in terms of volume was only 5.4% - down 1.3% on December 2007.  Will they, won't they? Confusion reigns as Dow exits Dell. What will happen to the company's channel policy? And will they take part in the PCA Conference? The best answer we've got at the moment is that Dell will find it difficult to put forward Andy Dow's replacement as a speaker at the PCA event - he's not arrived at the company yet. But yes, they are completely committed to building their indirect sales and have stated their intention to get closely involved with the PCA over the coming months. CeBIT 2009. The premier event for the ICT sector, where "all the world comes together", takes place in Hannover on 3rd - 8th March 2009. "PCA Abroad" is likely to take place again this year Although we might expect the coming event to be smaller than ever, it will still have thousands of exhibition stands and hundreds of thousands of visitors. We're aiming to run another "PCA Abroad" event, which may quite possibly involve the consumption of alcoholic beverages on at least one evening of the show. It will probably take place in Hamburg, which is the location of choice for many visitors, on the basis that it can take as long to travel from there to the Messegelande (the showground) as it does from some of the Hannover hotels, and the hotels there are cheaper and the nightlife more varied. Let us know if you are interested in attending any get-together we organise. You can pre-book your entrance tickets through Anna Haines at Sector Marketing on 01275 335911, and make your hotel & travel arrangements through Pressplan Travel on 01727 833291 e-mail tours@pressplantravel.com Genuine Customer Enquiries just £2.25 That's what new kids on the block AltruWorld.com are promising AltruWorld is a no-cost directory service with no registration or membership charges and no charge for key word searches. Businesses who subscribe to the service to so for free, merely paying a small amount for any customer enquiry they decide to reply to. Which sounds a bit of a no-brainer. More information at www.altruworld.com Do you really want to supply to government? The government want you to supply them (so they say) Supply2.gov.uk is the best practice means of advertising lower-value contracts. Aiming to allow public sector buyers to promote their contracts of under £100k to businesses that are keen to work with government. Over 90,000 contracts are published on the portal, from 5,900 registered buyers. There are already 112,000 suppliers registered. Are you? And if not, why not? "You ain't seen nothin' yet!" GfK's International Telecomms Conference. The mobile phone is the remote control for this digital life. The state of that marketplace, even facing a recession, was aptly summed up by keynote speaker Jim Hyde, UK MD of T-Mobile "You ain't seen nothin' yet". The spend per customer in the mobile telecoms marketplace is nothing short of phenomenal. the total UK marketing spend in the sector is £4bn, approx £80 for each of the 50 million mobile customers taking into account the churn rate, and therefore accepting that the spend is in reality directed at people who are likely to move to a different provider, it works out at £320 each 86% of mobile users take their phones to bed with them the majority of customers would rather turn the thermostat down than turn their phone off. Free promotion for your business. Web 2.0 offers a whole new world of promotional opportunities for your business. With the leverage of BT behind it, Tradespace might just be what your business needs BT Tradespace promotes itself as a lot more than a business listing: it brings together potential customers and business partners in an online community, giving you the opportunity to add the whole Web 2.0 gamut of media promotion, including audio, video and blogs, thus giving your potential customers an in-depth insight into your business. As well as basic promotion it allows you to network, promote special events and get involved in your local community. And it's free. Register at www.bttradespace.com/standoutnow What a load of Horlicks! Breathing new life into an old brand. A lesson for us all Horlicks is making great efforts to revive their brand and present to a younger audience than the OAPs that are seen to be the main Ovaltine addicts. Evidence would seem to indicate that they are succeeding. We have anecdotal evidence of younger consumers buying multiple jars of the product because they can get a free magazine subscription. What a great win-win for both Horlicks and the publishers, and what a great marketing lesson: even the most mature brands are capable of re-bundling in order to attract a different audience or to increase sales. The question being, of course, what can the ICT market do with our brands and offerings that will make them more attractive to our existing audience, or help us to address a new one. |
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Professional Computing Association, PO Box 48, Royston, Herts, SG8 6JS Tel: 0845 634 9245 Fax: 0845 634 9247 Email: admin@pcauk.org |
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