Irvine Firm a Bit Overzealous in Describing Deal
Comparator Systems Corp., a tiny technology company that has been struggling for years to find a market for its fingerprint identification machines, would have had you believe that it had signed a deal with a major rental-car company that would provide financing to market a new generation of products.
In a release Thursday, the company announced that it had formed a joint venture with Orion Systems Ltd., which it said is 52%-owned by Budget Rent-A-Car Corp., the Chicago-based car rental giant. In fact, Orion is 52%-owned by a licensee of Budget Rent-A-Car of Toronto.
And in an interview, Comparator’s director of public relations, Paul Webster, said the deal would provide the company with $5 million to $10 million, which would be used to bring the company’s planned ID-2 fingerprint identification system--an updated version of its original product that could be used for credit and automated teller machine cardholder identification--to market by 1991.
In fact, James F. Green, vice president of marketing at Orion Systems, said that the company had signed a letter of intent for a joint venture but that it is providing no financing. After being told of the conflicting statement from Orion, Robert Reed Rogers, Comparator’s chairman and chief executive, said Webster’s previous statement about the financing was in error.
The bottom line is that Orion Systems will assist Comparator in developing products for the rental-car market--such as computerized car rental kiosks--based on its fingerprint technologies. But Comparator still needs millions of dollars to develop its ID-2 and related products.
“We aren’t getting a bloody nickel out of this,” Rogers said of the Orion deal. “The purpose of the venture is to work with a client in the car rental industry to develop our biometric fingerprint system for use in the car rental industry.”
Rogers said the publicly held company’s ability to produce systems for the market by 1991 is contingent upon financing, and he said the deal with Orion would put the company in a better position to obtain capital.
For the nine months ended March 31, Comparator lost $1.1 million on revenue of about $4,000. In the comparable year-earlier period, the Irvine firm lost $915,989 on revenue of $46,136.
Orion’s Green said his company is enthusiastic about Comparator’s product. “The technologies being developed by Comparator are exciting to us and will help them develop and market the products that relate to our industry,” he said.
