Media File: 1983
Sinclair in the News

Financial Times
January 14, 1983

Private placing values Sinclair at £136m

Sinclair Research, the personal computer company, has been valued at £136m by a private placement of 10 per cent of its equity with City institutions. N. M. Rothschild, the merchant banker, has priced the 400,000 shares on sale at £34. Final allocation of the shares is not expected until next week. Mr Clive Sinclair, who owned 95 per cent of Sinclair Research is expected to raise nearly £13m from the sale of shares. Mr Ian Henry, who owned the remaining 5 per cent of the company is also selling 10 per cent of his shares.

Sinclair Research was founded in July 1979 and sold its first product in February 1980. Investors have been told the company expects to make a profit of £14m on sales of £50m in the year ending March 31 1983.

Last year the company made a profit of nearly £9m on sales of just over £27m. The finance raised by the share sale will largely be used by Mr Sinclair for one of his pet projects to produce a low-cost, battery-driven town car. Sinclair Research is expected to seek a public quotation in about one year's time.

Sinclair Research has sold over 900,000 computers since it was founded.

It is expected to launch a pocket-sized black and white television later this year which will sell at about £50. Most of its products are made by Timex at Dundee. Earlier this week Mr Sinclair threatened to move production away from Timex, if the workforce went on strike over redundancies involving other products.