Instead of merely selling its sensors or making a royalty, it will have exclusive rights in Europe to products developed by the joint venture and share the rights with Mitsubishi in the rest of the world except Japan. One idea is that Aromascan’s sensors will be incorporated in the production line and linked with neural network software that can learn from patterns of activity and deal with problems while the line is running. For example, sensors linked to a food production line might sense that tea, say, is being tainted.Allied to other sensors based on vision and touch we have the basis of the intelligent factory of the future. It set up four pilot schemes to test the technology in the field of industrial process controls One example related to rice.

Japanese rice sells for three times the price of imports, making substitution tempting despite tough domestic controls. Aromascan’s equipment offers a potential deterrent since the only thing it could not do, according to the Japanese, was identify the village from which the Japanese rice came.No big deal, you may think, but the implications for industrial processes are enormous. The shares have weakened since, partly because Aromascan is reluctant to talk freely about what it could all mean.Mitsubishi first began talking to Aromascan in January, 1995. As the year unfolds there are likely to be more link-ups.One deal announced last month is a strategic alliance with Japanese giant, Mitsubishi. Other companies producing equipment based on sensors, such as Renishaw with its touch probes and Druck with its pressure sensors, are highly regarded by investors. Aromascan is talking to a string of well-known companies in industrial controls about possible uses for its polymer-based sensing equipment.

Sensors in smell, measuring airborne chemicals, could have wide application. Sensors of all kinds are playing an important role in many fields including industrial processing. Although the balance sheet is healthy, with more than pounds 4m cash, a further fundraising will be required later in the year.Against that background there may be little rush to buy the shares – they have recently fallen away from a peak of over 180p to 155p.There is also a slightly comic air to a company that has invented a machine that smells – an “electronic nose” would probably be more at home in a fairground.But investors will take the company more seriously when they understand it better. One company that embodies this heady mix of risk and potentially large rewards is Aromascan, which produces technology to scan smells in digital form.
Capitalised at pounds 41m, the group makes no secret of the fact that it will be showing significant losses (pounds 1.5m plus) when it reports later in June against the house stockbroker’s earlier hoped-for pounds 900,000 loss.

New technology is exciting but often makes for a bumpy share price ride with near-term prospects clouded by delays and fundraisings while the distant prospect of untold wealth seems to remain just that. Its moves into Asia and Latin America show that nimbleness and risk-taking have not yet deserted the board. The fall in the shares is overdone: long-term growth is still attainable, even if not at the heady rates of yesteryear.With a positive dividend outlook, the shares are a buy, for the long- term – if only for the yield.BTRShare price 269pProspective p/e 11.9Gross dividend yield 6.7%Year to 31 December 1994 1995 1996* 1997*Turnover (bn) pounds 9.44 pounds 9.78 na naPre-tax profits (bn) pounds 1.078 pounds 1.503 pounds 1.430 pounds 1.550Earnings per share 24.5p 26p 24.3p 24.9pDividend per share 13.5p 14.7p 15.1p 16p*Panmure Gordon forecasts. Sales in the latter have grown fourfold since 1991, and will double this year, with the additions of automotive suppliers Metalurgica Carbo and OSA.

Construction, commercial interiors and aggregates are all for sale.Overall, there is much going for BTR. With OECD economies set to expand at 2 to 3 per cent a year, and given that 90 per cent of sales are in these areas, the problem becomes clearer. However, it is making strenuous efforts to develop a presence in the emerging, fast-growing economies of Asia and South America. But it also sold its Dunlop Slazenger business, as well as 19 other businesses which did not fit – while buying eleven more, Nylex excluded.However, there seems to be a method to the latest strategy, with its shift away from consumer items to serving a broad range of industry. Given its size, in many ways, BTR can only hope to be a proxy for the economies in which its has a presence. Its biggest move last year was the pounds 2bn buyout of the 38 per cent minority stake in Australian quoted BTR Nylex, in the hope of gaining a solid platform to spearhead its thrust into Asia. Packaging, the largest, had sales of almost pounds 1bn, with products ranging from glass bottles to plastic cartons for milk and fizzy drinks.BTR has always been hard to keep abreast of, given the staggering range of businesses in which it operates, and the bewildering pace with which it continues to shuffle its deck.