P96-Update, company holidays and more
A new version V2.4.6 of P96 is available for all registered customers and those who want to become registered. A small bug when opening bitplaned modes has been fixed. These are rarely-used modes with graphics cards, and the bug was only triggered with intuition V46 or higher. There are more changes in the works: We're working together with graphics card manufacturer MNTMN and others on adding a new key feature to the P96 graphics software. Further, work on the Permedia2 driver has been started in order to improve it - We'll be able to offer a major update to P96 in the next few months that will also be useful to users of Cybergraphics cards.
Our company holidays 2020 will begin on July 3rd this year. Orders that have been paid for by 12:00 CET will be shipped same-day. Starting July 20th, 2020, orders that came in during the holidays will be shipped. Support in our support forum will continue with reduced man power.
On July 1st, 2020, the German state reduces the VAT rate from 19% to 16%. While this is meant to strengthen the economy, the German state obviously didn't think about small companies like ours, where this causes unreasonable extra work to implement the change in the online shop and invoicing system. We expect administrative cost of this change to be higher than the expected extra sales, but we still want to give a small price cut: Two thirds of the tax cut will be used to lower the customer's prices and one third will be used to cover the administrative expenses. This may sound like "a lot" for the customer, but it only means that Invisision ECS V2 is 1.65 EUR cheaper, and even the ACA1233n-55 is only 6.33 EUR lower than currently advertised. For customers outside Europe, it even means that our prices appear higher than before. Even though iComp's financials are solid, we reserve the right to increase the prices before December 31st, 2020 if it turns out that extra sales don't cover the extra expenses due to this tax change.
Unfortunately, new developments didn't make it into the ship before the company holidays: Indivision AGA MK3 and our new power supply for A500, A600 and A1200 can now be pre-ordered, but will only be shipped a few weeks after the company holidays. Our assembly partners have already confirmed that the first mass-produced units will be delivered to us by their own delivery service on July 20th, 2020, so we're confident that we can beat the announced delivery dates in August by a few days.
Some international parcels could not be shipped since April/May of this year, because deutsche Post doesn't accelt "Warenpost" shipments to some countries. We're referred to the premium service of DHL, which is available at a "small" surcharge, but as small as the surchage may seem, the change from Warenpost to DHL Premium service with the surcharge means a multiplication of shipping cost by several times. We don't want to make customers wait any longer and will ship for this price before our company holidays. Customers will be asked to cover the difference of about 25,- EUR on a voluntary basis. If a destination can't be shipped to using the surcharged DHL service, we'll refund the money, so we won't have any open cases over the company holidays.