Piper Jaffray staged an investment conference at the same as Bear Stearns & Co the other day, and Richmond, Virginia-based consumer electronics and appliance retailer Circuit City Stores Inc was among the companies making the trip to Minneapolis, telling the assembly it is comfortable with analysts’ consensus earnings estimates of $0.41 per share for its second fiscal quarter and $2.00 for the full year: the company earned $0.25 a share in its first quarter ended May 31, up from $0.20 last year.
Fresh from signing a letter of intent with a private, unnamed Chinese company for the distribution of its residential wireless security systems in China, North St Paul, Minnesota-based ITI Technologies Inc told the Piper Jaffray conference that it expects to sign a distribution agreement with Telefonica de Espana SA that could add at least $5m to $10m in annual sales: president and chief executive Thomas Auth said the Chinese deal was worth $10m over two years; in 1994 the company had sales of $59m, with international sales accounting for 15%, two-thirds of which were in Canada; the company also sees opportunities to sell to the regional Bells as telephone, personal computer and cable services integrate.
Maybe that’s where the cash raised by the sale of 2.5m of its shares will be spent (CI No 2,662) – growing modem king US Robotics Corp’s overseas business: the company’s chief financial officer Mark Remissong told the Piper Jaffray investment conference in Minneapolis last week that it wants to grow its international business to 50% of revenue from 20% currently: the increase will come as it expands its distribution abroad; it markets in Europe and Japan now, and will expand in the Far East in 1996.
Claiming to have sold 50% of all videoconferencing software worldwide, PictureTel Corp said it expects its turnover to grow by at least 40% per year for the next three years; it had revenues of $255m in 1994 and has enjoyed steep growth, with sales rising by 45% last year and by 70%, on average, for each year of the last five years; in the future the company will focus on international markets, where about 45% of it sales are currently, pushing that figure to 50% this year and 55% in 1996; it thinks its deal with Compagnie des Machines Bull SA’s Zenith Data Systems will help it penetrate the French market (CI No 2,689); it is to enter the China this year, opening offices in Peking and Shanghai.
Getting ready to cover the world, on-line service provider America Online Inc says that by the end of the year it expects to have launched its yet-to-be named European joint venture with German company Bertelsmann AG, expanded into Canada, and be active in Japan: in the US it reckons it will have 5m subscribers by the end of next year, up from 2.3m currently; the company, which claims to be the fastest-growing US on-line service, expects $140m in revenues in the fourth quarter, up from $106m in the third and a sharp rise from $40m in the fourth quarter of 1994.
The shift to 32-bit systems from 8-bit ones, and the planned move to 64-bit systems, has undermined the video games market according to Funco Inc, which also blames the changes for its reported $0.22 per share loss on sales of $80.4m for the year ending April 2: chief operating officer Stanley Bodine told the Piper Jaffray conference that the shifts meant the market for video games and accessories would remain soft for the next quarter and, consequently, the company, which sells interactive entertainment products, has postponed expansion plans until things improve; he expected the market would respond favourably to the new systems being introduced by Sega Enterprises Ltd and Sony Corp in the second half of 1996, but declined to comment on projections that the company will record a loss of $0.05 a share this year, saying he hoped it would do better than that.
