Corel Corp, the Canadian-based owner of the WordPerfect word processing package, appears to be making at least a limited recovery after two disastrous financial years.
The company has reported a profit of $9.2m (£5.75m) on revenues of $72.5m (£45.3m) for the second quarter of 1999, which compares with losses of $30m (£18.75m) for the 1998 full financial year and $232m (£145m) in the 1997 full financial year.
The losses came after WordPerfect saw its market position increasingly eroded by the rival Microsoft Word package.
Corel has said that the upswing, which was well ahead of many analysts' predictions, was partly due to the successful release of WordPerfect Office 2000 and the Draw 9 graphics package.
Michael Cowpland, president of Corel Corp, said that the legal industry continued to be the key target market across the globe for the WordPerfect Office suite.
"Our key strategy is to concentrate on the 22 million users of WordPerfect in the US and the 30 million users worldwide," Cowpland said.
"And the legal group is the most important core of that installed base," he added.