Floated at 71p in March last year and now just 8.5p, telecoms and data services play NetServices has shed two weaker divisions and is now a leaner and meaner corporate beast.

‘We’d warned that we were overexposed to broadband wholesale,’ recalls chief executive Mark Vickers, but market perception quickly turned negative when, soon after its arrival on AIM, the company was damaged by Carphone Warehouse’s aggressive free broadband promotion.

During the past year to August, this wholesale division was sold off for a profit of £400,000 and an unpromising other arm closed down. This, plus bad debt, caused turnover to slide 22% to £12.6m – though pre-tax losses were slashed from £2.9m to £0.5m.

The business has been tidied up and Vickers’s strategy has since been to increase customer retention and margins by selling the offering in bundles, tapping into the desire of corporations for ‘convergence’ – that is getting more than one service from a single supplier. The client base now boasts blue-chip names such as Xerox, Admiral and Telefonica – even BT. ‘They all come to us because no-one else can do all that we do,’ maintains Vickers.

He is particularly excited by a new product to help SMEs migrate over to internet telephony more cheaply than with a rival BT product. There’s also potential in recent collaborations with some impressive partners, including Vodafone subsidiary Yes and Admiral, to corner more of the business VoIP market. With prospects the healthiest they’ve been for 18 months, NetServices’ valuation looks ungenerous.

NetServices	AIM	£1.66m	5.62p	0.00p
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Other company articles:
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Interim breakeven at NetServices			13/05/2008
NetServices			22/11/2007
Newcomer - NetServices			08/03/2006