Dell Computer Corp has now opened its $10m manufacturing and customer service centre in Malaysia to serve the Asian-Pacific market: the 238,000-square-foot facility on the northern Malaysian island of Penang will make desktop, portable and network server computers for sale in 56 countries; Dell’s only other plants are in Austin, Texas and in Limerick, Ireland, and the company says the new plant will be crucial to its goal of increasing revenues from the Asian-Pacific region to one-third of total revenues, compared with under 10% at present.
Microsoft Corp excoriated the anonymous companies challenging its settlement of federal antitrust charges in the final round of briefings before the scheduled April 24 hearing on the case in the US Court of Appeals, saying their refusal to identify themselves is outrageous; it asserted that the companies include some of Microsoft’s most powerful competitors, and Reuter points out that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has publicly said that Sun Microsystems Inc is among the companies funding the anonymous challenge to the antitrust settlement, which was rejected as inadequate by US District Judge Stanley Sporkin; Microsoft and the Department of Justice are asking the appeals court to overturn Sporkin’s ruling and assign the anti-trust case to a new judge.
New York-based WinStar Communications Inc, which was to have taken its stake in Washington-based Avant-Garde Telecommunications Inc to 80%, is now going to buy the company outright: Avant-Garde holds 30 licences, each encompassing four 100MHz millimeter wave radio channels over which WinStar delivers speech, data, and video over 400MHz of exclusive bandwidth through the use of Wireless Fibre in the 38GHz band; WinStar will exchange 1.275m restricted common shares for the 51% of Avant-Garde it does not already own; with Wireless Fibre, the last mile link between the subscriber and a fibre optic cable is made by microwave radio rather than via a fixed terrestrial cable link.
McCaw Cellular Communications Inc has changed the name of its cellular operations from Cellular One to AT&T Wireless Services in Washington and Oregon today; it has also changed the name of its in-flight communications company from Claircom to the Aviation Communications Division of AT&T Wireless Services.
Nokia Oy’s Nokia Mobile Phones Ltd says it has a joint venture agreement with the Chinese Post & Telecommunications Industrial Corp for the manufacture and distribution of mobile telephones and network products: a new 50-50 joint venture company, Beijing Nokia Mobile Telecommunications Ltd will offer complete digital mobile phone nets.
Oracle Corp finally confirmed that it has held talks with other companies on a consortium bid for AppleComputer Inc, and said the plan had failed so far because its would-be partners – who would have been expected to take the hardware side away – did not want to participate; in an interview on national television in the US, chief executive Larry Ellison said Oracle has no continuing discussions with either Apple or with Lotus Development Corp, another company that Oracle is said to interested in buying.
Latest intelligence on IBM Corp’s plans for the AS/400s with the PowerPC-derived processors is that customers will get a briefing on them next month, but the announcement will not come until after June, although no firm date is set; there is also no date yet for first deliveries, although IBM hopes it will be before the end of the year for all models except for very high-end ones, which will come in above the 9406 Model 320 upgrades – as IBM promised, the new machines will be available as processor swap-outs for those that upgraded to the latest models; the very top-end machines are expected to be available in first quarter 1996.
Apropos the observability template that users will need if they are to upgrade to the PowerPC AS/400s without recompilation, and which some may have deleted to free up disk space (CI No 2,643), IBM Corp is adamant that 99% of AS/400 use
rs have retained their observability and won’t need to recompile.
Wang Laboratories Inc chief executive Joseph Tucci says the company plans to use a $90m investment from Microsoft Corp (see front page) to fund its growth internally and through acquisitions: he says the deal with Microsoft will put Wang’s imaging technology on over 100m desktops in the next several years, up from less than 10m currently, adding that Wang’s patent infringement lawsuit served as the catalyst for talks between the two firms; the company still has a suit pending against Watermark Software Inc, Burlington, Massachusetts, and says it will be suing other companies; the Wang stock being bought by Microsoft will convert at $23 a share.
IBM Corp’s 3995 Optical Library Dataserver Models A63, 063 and 163 can now be directly attached to iAPX-86-based personal computers: the three models store 20Gb, 40Gb and 188Gb respectively and are connected via an SCSI connection.
Motorola Inc appears to be dividing its semiconductor expansion favours between Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and Richmond, Virginia, with the latter put on hold for now: it expects to double the number of exployees at Research Triangle Park, where it bought a Harris Corp plant, to as many as 1,000 over the next five years, investing several hundred million dollars in the expansion, adding new buildings and fabrication space, more than doubling the existing floor space and capacity of the current 150,000-square-foot facility, which produces Motorola’s 8-bit microcontrollers and high-speed logic devices used in communications, automotive and consumer applications; when all expansions are completed, the facility will produce a wide range of advanced microcontrollers; as far as Gooch County – or West Creek – Virginia is concerned, it has merely signed a 120-day option to buy about 230 acres of land for the possible development of a new semiconductor facility, with a five-year option on an additional 140 acres adjacent to the primary site; if Motorola does exercise the option, start of construction of the first phase of a 10-year multi-phase development will be determined based on business conditions and there is no timetable as yet; it could employ 1,000 people on completion of the first phase, up to 5,000 when fully developed after 10 years or longer.
Digital Equipment Corp may cut an additional 2,000 to 3,000 staff on top of the job cut plans already announced, chief executive Robert Palmer told CNBC in an interview, adding that the possible job cuts represent a very modest additional trimming that might take place in a few overhead areas; I wouldn’t characterise (the company) as turned around, but it’s clear that we’re doing the right things, he asserted – We’re more than half-way through the financial part of the turnaround (and) we’re about half-way through the cultural and transformation part, he declared.
Banyan Systems Inc, Westborough, Massachusetts sold a 20% stake in its Japanese unit to Marubeni Corp, with another 20% reserved for other strategic partners, and has won a major OEM contract from Hitachi Ltd, under which Hitachi licenses all Japanese versions of Banyan’s enterprise networking software and integrate the products into its hardware and applications software.
Xyratex Ltd, Havant, Hampshire IBM UK Ltd buyout has established a US operation in San Jose and is recruiting for people in sales, customer support and administration: the company says it is on target for first-year sales of $500m; the company has test systems for Serial Storage Architecture, a Stress Test Rack for disk drive manufacturers and a Barkhausen Popcorn Noise Analyzer (really) that measures and diagnoses noise-after-write instability in magnetic recording heads.
SBC Communications Inc and Cable & Wireless Plc joined Corporate Africa Ltd, a South African black business group to create New Africa Communications to bid to install 1m new telephone lines: it is competing with the Africa Global group, formed last month by a broa
d-based all-iance including Bell Atlantic Corp, Alcatel CIT SA and Philips Electronics NV – for the tender put out by the South African state-owned telephone company Telkom Ltd.
Cisco Systems Inc has awarded a $100m manufacturing contract to the Celestica Inc unit of IBM Canada Ltd to produce a series of products for Cisco’s high-end router family.
Sun Microsystems Inc has formed an alliance with Netscape Communications Corp to develop Internet products and market them jointly: as a first step, Netscape’s Navigator browser software will be integrated into the Solaris operating system; We will have a much bigger Internet announcement on May 23 that will come out of this Sun chief Scott McNealy said, adding that they would unveil further details about a joint product at that time.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co plans next year to market a player that can read optical disks to the Toshiba Corp Digital Video Disk standard and also play existing audio CDs; details such as price and sales volume are not yet set; Matsushita’s dual-focus pickup, using a special lens, makes it possible to read information from both video and compact disks with a single pickup, though the two differ in thickness and recording density.
Samsung Electronics Co is lining up alongside Toshiba Corp in the battle of the Digital Video Disk standards, saying it believes Toshiba’s format could offer better quality than the one promoted by Sony Corp.
