Trading in the shares of UK Internet payment start-up earthport has been suspended as the company warns of a shortfall in working capital and seeks new equity finance.
The suspension of trading in AIM-listed earthport follows the company's late-April announcements of delays in the development of its third generation online payment platform and a shortfall in revenues for the year to 30 June 2001.
"The new platform has just successfully completed formal technical and operational due diligence by independent third party specialists Technical Investment Services Limited," says the company in a brief statement. "However the continuing delay in revenue generation for contracts in relation to both Version 2 and Version 3 of the system has led the Board of earthport to anticipate a shortfall in working capital in the near term."
Company directors say they are currently negotiating with a number of potential providers of new equity finance and have sought a suspension of trading pending completion of these discussions.
Earthport's new industrial strength technology platform has been built in partnership with IBM, EMC and eircom. Consisting of two IBM mainframe S/390 Parallel Enterprise Servers and an initial three terabytes of EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage, earthport says the new platform is capable of handling 70,000 credits and debits per second and processing up to 150 million transactions per day.
Earthport says its customers - including direct bank Egg and mobile Internet company Mvivia - will move over to the platform upon completion of customer acceptance testing.