City Talk: Finding security in Workplace

An interesting flotation going through the market is Workplace Technologies. A placing at 175p a share values the company at pounds 50.7m. The placing was understood to have been three times oversubscribed, no mean feat in the current jittery climate. What attracts investors to Workplace Technologies is its capability to design, install and operate data, voice and video networks. One to watch.

Last week Pilkington fell out of bed with a nasty bump when, on Wednesday, its shares collapsed by 12 per cent. The cause of this upset was news of French competitor Saint Gobain building a glass plant in the UK.

For analyst Mike Betts at Goldman Sachs, the falls are overdone. Even allowing for Saint Gobain's incursion, Pilkington's shares are undervalued by 45 per cent. It is likely that negative sentiment will continue to surround the shares for a while, but for the brave, there are firm grounds for believing a turning point has arrived.

So the turbulence of the past few weeks seems to be receding, and with it, fears of a 1987-style crash. On Wall Street it looks as if, in a sharp reversal of their previous role, retail investors did most to save the day. Over here, too, retail selling was, for most of the time, subdued - even if there is less evidence of the impulse to buy that seems to have gripped the armchair investor.

It will be an irony not lost on Wall Street that for all the times it has tried to turn over Main Street, it was Main Street that seems to have saved its bacon. Will Wall Street adopt a more user-friendly approach? That, I suspect, would be asking too much.

Down on Ofex, something of a stir is being caused by Robotic Technology Systems. The shares have now hit 145.5p, up from the 20p at which they were floated in July 1996. That is heady stuff, and for a company of this size, discounts a remarkable rate of growth.

The market could be right, of course - it has to be sometimes. And while RTS has some promising products, notions that comparisons can in some way be made to the fledgling Microsoft, smacks of a desperate desire to ramp a share that has already been ramped way beyond any realistic valuation.

It remains a hold, although the more cautious among you may be sensible in taking profits. Otherwise, the shares look well up with events.

richard phillips