14 DAY TRIAL // Mandriva is flowing on a decreasing trend. The French software company, the creator of the Mandriva Linux distribution, has registered a significantly reduced income for this year so far, in comparison to the same period of 2006.
If back in 2006 by this time the revenues were counting almost EUR 3.0 million, this time they have barely reached EUR 2.1 million. According to some sources inside the company, the facts responsible for this situation would be some structural and development management issues. According to them "the expense structure is too heavy". Mandriva targets to develop now a new strategy that should ensure a cut down in the expenses of EUR 1 million per year and more details on its new strategy are said to be released this June too.
Mandriva also unfolds now a new investment round concerning all its shareholders and employees. This May the shareholders approved the EUR 1.6 million capital increase to the shareholders and EUR 55,000 increase to the employees. This investment round was supplied by the Occam Capital, who invested EUR 1.65 million in Mandriva. Initially the company considered using this money for exiting the "plan de continuation" bankruptcy protection it entered in 2004, but then it seemed that a capital increase and the development of a new marketing strategy sounded more promising.
Mandriva was created under the MandrakeSoft name back in 1998. It counts now almost 130 employees (80 of whom are engineers) and owns offices in France, USA and Brazil. It has sale representations in more than 140 countries and there are almost 6-to-8 million Mandriva Linux users estimated. The first Mandriva release from 1998 was based on Red Hat Linux (version 5.1) and KDE (version 1.0). Since then, it diverged from Red Hat and took in many original tools designed to mostly ease system configuration.