Buy-out will keep land database for NZ

By ADAM GIFFORD

A desire to keep a critical database of land information in New Zealand hands is behind the decision by Dunedin's Animation Research Holdings to buy out the other shareholders in mapping company Terralink International.

Animation Research has doubled its stake to 80 per cent. The remaining shares were bought by Terralink management.

Out are Australian mapmaker Aspect North, which gained its shareholding through its acquisition of New Zealand Aerial Mapping, and Mike and Lesley Bundock.

Animation Research is mainly known for its contribution to the development of the Virtual Spectator internet viewer for America's Cup races, but has pioneered a range of new applications involving data visualisation.

It teamed up with New Zealand Aerial Mapping and the Bundocks in late 2001 to buy the assets of state-owned mapping company Terralink from receivers for $7.2 million.

The consortium shifted a further $10 million of assets into the company in the form of eMap, an electronic mapping and viewing system with associated databases which Aerial Mapping had built on the Smallworld GIS data management software platform developed by Mike Burdock.

Animation Research managing director Ian Taylor said the shareholders had different priorities for the business.

"We initiated this buy-out so we could keep the focus in the direction we wanted it to be," Taylor said.

"Our vision is to find new ways to deliver this data and make sure it is complete and accurate."

Key to this was the decision to put Terralink's locality database of 1.4 million addresses and place names into a new Emergency Services Trust.

Terralink is trying to convince the Government to adopt this database, which is already used by the main emergency services, rather than spend millions of dollars developing its own.

"To do that we had to ensure the land database was 100 per cent New Zealand-owned," Taylor said.

Terralink will continue to work with Aspect North on civilian and defence mapping work in Australia for the Australian Federal Government GeoScience panel.

In the 13 months to the end of June 2002, Terralink lost $4.78 million on revenue of $15.1 million, with asset write-offs and restructuring of more than $1 million, high computing costs and $2.1 million in depreciation accounting for most of the loss.

In 2003, aggressive depreciation of intellectual property and goodwill again pushed the company into the red with a $3.69 million loss on revenue of $10.59 million.

Chief executive Mike Donald said there were similar write-offs for the year just ended.

He said the share buy-out was welcomed by staff, as was a promise of a staff share scheme later in the year.

Terralink