The Belgian firm, which announced in its first-quarter results that it had appointed ING Corporate Finance to advise on options including a possible sale of the business, posted a significant drop in sales and profits.

Revenues for the quarter fell from £8.5m (€12.6m) last year to £7.1m this year, while pre-tax profit plummeted 33% to £2m, compared with the £3m reported in Q2 2006.

Chairman Guido Van der Schueren said: “We had expected the second-quarter results to be in line with those of the first quarter. This was, however, not the case and Q2 turned out to be weaker than expected on the revenue side in the US, the UK and France.”

Van der Schueren blamed the poor results on “a delay in decision-making” and maintained that the company was on track to meet its full-year targets.

He said: “The picture looks bleaker than it actually is. Order intake in the second quarter clearly indicated that we are on track to achieve the targets we set for 2007.”

He added, though, that the second half of the year would benefit from improved business from subsidiary Enfocus, which develops PDF workflow software.

Artwork Systems also came out in support of Microsoft’s XPS document format through its investment in NiXPS, a software firm dedicated to developing cross-platform applications for XPS.

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Artwork Systems results
Q2 turnover
2007: £7.1m
2006: £8.5m
Q2 pre-tax profit
2007: £2m
2006: £3m
First-half figures
Turnover: £14.6m
Profit: £4.4m