Corel refocuses on core apps

Corel intends to refocus on its traditional applications business in an attempt to become profitable by its third fiscal quarter.

As a result of the reshuffle, announced yesterday, the troubled software company will pump its resources into building up the WordPerfect Office desktop suite it acquired from Novell, its CorelDraw graphics package, and other future "creative" products aimed mainly at the Apple Macintosh market. It plans to launch CorelDraw for the Mac in the summer.

Corel's president and chief executive, Derek Burney, claimed: "We're not going to go into a head-to-head battle with Microsoft Office. We're changing the rules of the game."

Microsoft last year surprised the industry by investing $135m in its rival in the personal productivity applications space, effectively saving it from bankruptcy.

Burney explained that Corel intends to expand its graphics product lines over the next two years by investing in, and acquiring, companies in areas such as web content, wireless imaging and graphics.

But it plans to effectively withdraw WordPerfect Office from the international stage by abandoning any further development of international language versions of the suite to focus on English. This will see the number of WordPerfect Office releases rationalised from 30 to four.

Burney hopes the move will enable Corel to achieve a compounded annual growth rate of at least 20 per cent over the next three years, but claimed there would be no further redundancies. Corel cut 320 jobs last year as part of its effort to return to profitability.

He also confirmed that the firm plans to spin off the distribution arm of its Linux business.