What's more the fabrics business is shifting US capacity to Dundee and rationalising facilities in Belgium moves which

What's more, the fabrics business is shifting US capacity to Dundee and rationalising facilities in Belgium, moves which will result in an exceptional charge in the 2001 interims.Although L&B may not be out of the woods, it could have the clearing in sight. Philip Reader, the chief executive since late 1999, has succeeded in unloading the packaging operations faster and for more money - £161m - than expected. This has unwound the balance sheet, leaving the group with current cash reserves of about £18m, a figure which is being boosted by £2m a month from operating cash flow.This should anchor the total dividend of 6p, down from 15.85p a year ago, so locking in a yield of more than 6 per cent. Yesterday's appointment of Jon Kempster as finance director from Linde, the house builders, is meant to bolster the specialist building materials operation and could pave the way for in-fill acquisitions to boost growth.With L&B's market capitalisation now just £90m, the group is trading on a mere four times operating cash flow.

Although the stock has been one of the worst performers on the London Stock Exchange since the mid-1990s, a modest turnaround looks, at last, to be on the cards. Buy.Microgen   Investors in Microgen, a data management services operator, have had a tough time over the past year with the stock 80 per cent off its 862p high. Just last week it plunged again ahead of yesterday's 2000 results, which saw the group swing from 1999 pre--tax profit of £2.4m to a pre-tax loss of £3.1m on an 11 per cent sales rise in continuing operations to £21.7m.The group's transition into an e-services supplier continues to gather pace with around 60 per cent of turnover in new businesses developed or acquired over the past two years With the shares up 10p to 170p Microgen is valued at £85m. That may be high enough until the viability of the company's B2B billing strategy is further advanced Hold..

When most people think of the technology called Bluetooth, the bog-standard image of mobile phones and hand-held devices linked up "wirelessly" to PCs or other gadgets springs to mind. When most people think of the technology called Bluetooth, the bog-standard image of mobile phones and hand-held devices linked up "wirelessly" to PCs or other gadgets springs to mind. However, Phil O'Donovan, managing director and co-founder of private company Cambridge Silicon Radio, envisages a more exciting, consumer-oriented use for the Bluetooth chips, named BlueCore, that are made by CSR. For the fitness freaks among us, Mr O'Donovan reckons that a training shoe containing Bluetooth technology will be on the shelves next year. The hi-tech trainer will be able to monitor how fast its wearer is running and communicate that information to a watch-like device that simultaneously monitors pulse rate. All the data can then be downloaded to form a complete picture of athletic performance and state of health. CSR is already talking to a shoe designer about such a project.The Cambridge-based CSR began life in 1998 as part of Cambridge Consultants, a design consultancy from which it was spun off in 1999. While that makes it sound as though the company is brand new, its three founders and six initial founding staff had actually been working on the design of the technology for several years.When Bluetooth became more mainstream, the company began to focus on the design and manufacture of single-chip devices, focusing initially on solutions for the 2.4GHz Bluetooth personal area networking standard.

Bluetooth allows devices to communicate with each other "wirelessly" over short distances and is now starting to appear on the shelves. Industry has invested so much in the area that the market is likely to become sizeable and lucrative. Some analysts predict it could grow to $6bn (£4.2bn) by 2005.But for investors CSR is not the typical chip company in that it eschews the less risky licensing model that is favoured by many, including ARM Holdings. Instead, CSR is a "fabless chip company", meaning that it sells directly to its customers but is not involved in the actual physical building of chips or other products."That is more risky, but it's potentially higher reward as well," says Mr O'Donovan. He claimsthat CSR is some nine months ahead of its competitors and that its technology has started selling in Japan, where it has been installed in next-generation laptops.

"There is nobody even close behind us as far as we can see," he says."We don't see anything that's close."The key to CSR's technology lead, Mr O'Donovan says, is the fact that it uses CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Silicon) technology to create a complete Bluetooth solution on a single chip, which brings down the cost. He reckons CSR has a $5-a-chip solution and is the only company that can currently deliver that.CSR shipped around 100,000 of its chips in 2000 but expects to ship "many, many more" this year. Customers thus far include Fujitsu Media Devices, Alcatel, ALPS Electric and Tochigi Mitsumi.Mr O'Donovan remains unconcerned by the prospect of a slowdown in IT spending or in the growth of the mobile phone market, despite reports of both "We hear about a slowdown, but we don't see it," he says. That was because companies were always planning and investing in the next generation of technology products, even in a slowdown, he continues. To date, CSR has received around $70m of funding from outside strategic investors, all of whom are "partners of some sort or other". When CSR was spun out of its parent company, three venture capital investors - 3i, Gilde IT Fund and Amadeus Capital Partners - came on board.Less than a year later, Intel invested an undisclosed sum in the business, and at the end of last year a raft of new investors including Sony, Philips, Compaq, ARM, Razorfish, Virata and Wavecom committed cash. Mr O'Donovan is reluctant to talk about how the company's equity is divided.All he will say is that the three early-stage investors have a "chunk", founders and staff have a "fair chunk", Cambridge Consultants have a minority and the other external investors have a share.Nor is he keen to comment on whether the cash raised from the company's external investors will take the business into profitability or to divulge how far away profitability might be.