More details emerge about Rock's demise

Posted at: 12:34pm 9th May 2008 by James Morris

How one errant employee helped bring down a promising mobile computing empire

As we reported yesterday, Rock, one of the UK’s leading home-grown notebook manufacturers has gone into administration. According to the statement posted on its website yesterday. Rock’s failure was ‘party attributed to the cash flow difficulties faced as a result of stock misappropriation by a former employee’. Now more details have emerged of exactly what happened.

According to court proceedings reported by the Kenilworth Weekly News, Rock’s rather opaque choice of words hide a sordid tale of theft by former head of sales Paul Bicknell. Hired at age 16, the 24-year-old repaid his employers with a series of misdeeds, starting in 2005.

The majority of these revolve around Bicknell’s position as the main sales contact for CFA Trading. This company purchased computer parts from Rock on a regular basis. However, CFA noticed that its payments weren’t going straight to Rock – they appeared to be ending up at garages. At the same time, Bicknell started driving expensive sports cars.

Aside from his penchant for luxury automotive transportation, Bicknell became addicted to online gambling. This started affecting his attendance at work, which he tried to cover up with a story about a death in the family.

Bicknell was eventually confronted in July 2007 and resigned. But the larceny didn’t end there. The following month, he broke into Rock’s warehouse and pinched £11,497 of computers. The total loss to Rock had reached £220,000.

You may not be able to get a decent one-bedroom flat in London for that much these days, but in the world of IT, this can be enough to turn a going concern into a closing down sale. Rock apparently met what has become a very predictable fate for computer vendors – its credit lines were reduced.

Computer components cost so much, and require such a quick turnaround to maintain their value, that large amounts of credit are required for retail businesses. Without it, you simply can’t trade, as you can’t build systems at the volume your business requires. A similar situation caused the downfall of the original Carrera Technology.

However, not everyone involved with Rock believes that the blame should be entirely laid on Bicknell. Ex-employees of the company have told Custom PC that they believe the theft case is being used as something of an excuse, hiding other issues with the company and its product range, although we haven’t been able to confirm their specific allegations.

Regardless of what lead to the cashflow problems, it’s certainly sad to see one of the UK’s remaining high-end computer company’s come to an ignominious end, especially as it has caught customers unaware.