Claim No: IP-2022-000086 - [2024] EWHC 1430 (IPEC)

Ms Gupta agreed in cross-examination that the Claimant’s presence in the UK when she arrived was smaller than it is now, saying that she had doubled the Claimant’s UK marketing efforts on her arrival in London, and had also increased the London marketing team from 22 people in 2022 to 27 people today. She said that the London marketing team worked on global sales of the Claimant’s products, not just UK sales.

In terms of quantifying those sales, Ms Gupta stated at paragraph 10 of her witness statement that the Claimant’s UK revenues between 2019 and 2022 were £6,208,000 in 2019/20, £10,723,000 in 2020/21, and £10,557,000 in 2021/22, with turnover split between Builder Studio and Builder Cloud as follows:

Ms Gupta does not state in her witness statement where those figures came from, but in cross-examination she said they were provided to her by the Claimant’s finance department. Whatever she received has not been disclosed and is not in the trial bundle. The more concerning issue is that these figures contradict those pleaded by the Claimant at paragraph 8A.1 of the APOC. There, the Claimant pleads that “since approximately March 2019 to the present [dated 3 May 2023], the Claimant had total UK sales revenues of approximately US $2.18 million.”. Again, the source of those figures has not been stated. It was put to Ms Gupta by Mr Lomas that this amounted to about half a million dollars a year, and that the revenues claimed in her witness statement had therefore gone up by a factor of about 20 to those contained in the APOC. Ms Gupta accepted that discrepancy, and said that she would give preference to the figures in her witness statement as being accurate, but accepted that the Court had no way of verifying them. I do not know what I can do with these unsupported and contradictory sets of figures and the answer is, I fear, that I am not able to rely on either of them as there is no documentary evidence to support either of them and Ms Gupta cannot assist me in assessing which are more likely to be correct on the balance of probabilities, as she was not involved in the production of either of them.