The healthy sequence is expected to continue, with Kleinwort's Jeremy Allen looking for pounds 4.7m and pounds 5.4m over the next two years to drop the p/e to under 15. This is a relatively mature market, with sales growth in the 10 to 15 per cent range. The company is far and away the world leader in the supply of sophisticated dummies used in crash testing. Ahead of it are Oki on Ecu 1.43, BPP Courses on Ecu 1.49, Boots Pharmaceuticals on Ecu 1.46 and Lucas Aftermarket Operations on Ecu 1.50.All 30 teams, including two from NatWest, are trying to run a medium-sized manufacturing company selling to the European Union and the United States. The Student Industrial Society team taking part in the game sponsored by National Westminster Bank sought to deal with a lack of production capacity caused by price cutting by putting the machine shop on three two shifts. This dealt with only part of the problem, since the assembly area was still short staffed and the company had burdened itself with higher costs as a result of paying overtime.The team also increased its marketing effort overseas, which again undermined profit margins.

RADICAL but different approaches to the problems confronting participants in the Independent Management Game are being tried by the two teams we are following through the semi-final round. The trust will be particularly sympathetic to people with good business ideas, but whose circumstances make them seem too risky to the main clearing banks.(Photograph omitted). The typical local authority loan fund is about pounds 300,000, where it needs to be pounds 1m or more.'Mr Conaty says the trust's initial portfolio will be a mixture of safe investments in social housing and the more risky responsibility of financing enterprise. Instead, it will be constituted as an industrial and provident society to issue shares, that will provide capital.Mr Conaty is development director of the trust. The trust has already appointed Sir Adrian Cadbury, former chairman of Cadbury Schweppes, as chairman, and Sir Richard Knowles, a former leader of the city council, is to be deputy chairman. It is expected that the trust will start with an asset base of pounds 3.5m.Although it will be a year before the scheme is up and running, recruitment of staff is due to begin next month, and the private sector will be approached for financial support next year. Final arrangements to finance it have not yet been resolved, but negotiations are in hand with the local City Challenge, Birmingham Training and Enterprise Council and the Government's taskforce.