GTSI reports $16 million net loss in '05

Beleaguered IT products and solutions company GTSI Corp. yesterday reported a net loss of $16 million on total revenue of $886.3 million for 2005.

The net loss contrasts with a net gain of $10.3 million on total revenue of almost $1.1 billion in 2004.

The Chantilly, Va., company, which is in the process of transforming itself from a traditional computer hardware reseller into a total solutions provider, suffered from a year of crippling setbacks. These included problems with the implementation of its new enterprise resources management system, a high employee attrition rate, deficiencies in some sales teams, and revenue and expense imbalances because of lower sales and higher employee-related costs.

Publicly traded GTSI received a staff determination letter from Nasdaq in early April because it failed to file its annual report on Form 10-K for 2005 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as market rules require. With GTSI's common stock subject to delisting by Nasdaq, the company now expects the request to be canceled because it filed the 10-K April 12, said Thomas Mutryn, GTSI's senior vice president and chief financial officer.

Mutryn and James Leto, GTSI's president and chief executive officer, discussed GTSI's financial results and the problems it faced in 2005 during a conference call with investors yesterday.

What's more, Ernst & Young, which audits the company, raised doubts about whether GTSI could continue as a going concern. GTSI said it obtained a commitment letter for a $125 million senior secured revolving credit facility from a consortium of banks to meet its seasonal working capital requirements and potential long-term borrowing needs. GTSI expects to close on the facility by May 31, and anticipates that Ernst & Young will remove its advisory.

GTSI lost about $90 million in revenue in 2005 because of changes in government procurement strategy, such as reverse auctions, direct negotiation of mass licensing agreements with software companies and the General Services Administration's SmartBUY program, under which the federal government can buy commercial software governmentwide in order to receive bulk savings, Leto said.

Mobile and desktop computers, enterprise computers, software, networking, services and enterprise storage were GTSI's main revenue-generated offerings in 2005. The company's top revenue-generating partners included Panasonic, Sun, Cisco, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

GTSI posted a loss of $5.6 million during the fourth quarter of 2005 on $279.2 million in revenue, compared with a net gain of more than $2.7 million on revenue of $327.9 million during the same period in 2004.

GTSI No. 19 on Washington Technology's 2005 Top 100 list of federal IT prime contractors. The 2006 Top 100 list will be released on May 15.