Under that program, the company is not responsible for invoicing and instead of recording gross sales, is paid a sales commission over three years. But CEO Thomas Honore was very happy with earnings that led Columbus to declare a dividend. "We are happy to be able to pay money back to our shareholders for the first time in the history of Columbus, he said. The roughly $20 million in income last year was more than 20 times the nominal amount earned in 2013. Revenue stayed roughly the same at around $162 million. North American revenue dropped to about $132 million, down 5.7 percent before currency adjustments. Third-party license revenue on the continent was off 35 percent. The shift to a consulting focus led to an 8 percent of revenue for that segment with 63,000 more billable hours delivered by the same number of people. Honore said results stemmed from improvements such as better project management and improved risk management.
COLUMBUS CONTINUES BIZ SHIFT Featured
Columbus story of 2013 was its continued efforts to decrease its reliance on Microsoft products. And the Copenhagen, Denmark-based company noted this week its success in transforming itself into a consulting business that relies on sales of its own products, not of third-party products. Revenue for 2013 was flat as the sale of what it calls external software dropped by 32 percent over 2013 levels. As executives went though results of regions in an earnings webcast this week, the repeated theme was the drop in third-party revenue because of Microsoft's changes to its partner program.
