Seiji Sanda, president of Apple Japan Inc has resigned after clashing with parent company officials over management policy: John Floisand, chairman of Apple Japan since 1993, will take control of the unit until a new president is chosen.
Microsoft Corp is making contingency plans to remove the Microsoft Network access software from Windows95 and still get the operating system out on August 24, if the Justice Department demands such a separation, the Wall Street Journal reported: We would be naive not to think through the possibilities, said Brad Silverberg, its senior vice-president in charge of Windows95 development told the paper.
AST Research Inc warns that it expects to report a record net loss for its fiscal fourth quarter and the loss would cause a technical default under its bank credit agreements: it believes it will be able to obtain a default waiver from its lenders – especially as the $377.5m investment by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd has been approved by both its shareholders and by the South Korean government.
South Korea’s semiconductor exports are expected to rise more than 50% this year to nearly $20,000m as a result of the raging world demand for memory chips: South Korea’s three major chipmakers said their combined chip sales were up 67% in the first half of this year, and look for a 62.2% increase for the year; Samsung Electronics Co Ltd says its half year chip sales were estimated at $3,200m, up 43%, and it has revised its annual target of chip sales to $7,000m from $6,300m, compared with $5,000m in 1994; the LG Semicon Co Ltd unit of the LG Group is growing even faster, with first half sales up 94% at $1,583m, and looks for an 86% rise for the year to $3,430m; and Hyundai Electronics Industries Co Ltd more than doubled its sales to $1,477m and it looks for $3,456m for the year.
Smith Corona Corp, New Canaan, Connecticut has retained the crisis management and turnaround consulting services firm of R F Stengel & Co Inc to advise the company, and it named Ronald Stengel interim president and chief executive of Smith Corona and a director, and another Stengeler joins the board.
Vodafone Group Plc says its second quarter trading for 1995 had seen net connections of 224,000, shooting the the total subscriber base through the 2m mark, hitting 2.04m.
MCI Communications Corp, the ANS CO+RE Systems Inc unit of America OnLine Inc and Sprint Corp have signed bilateral agreements to interconnect their Internet networks for direct exchange of traffic, and have agreed to establish standard operational procedures; Sprint and ANS interconnected their Internet networks earlier this year; they reckon they transport some 80% of the total Internet traffic on their backbone networks, the trio said.
Cable & Wireless Plc’s Mercury Communications Ltd has begun installing those 1,500 payphones in the UK for Italian company IPM Group SpA: the first Interphone public payphone was unveiled in London’s Tottenham Court Road yesterday; the Interphones will only take coins initially but there are plans to introduce a credit card option later this year, the Sittingbourne-based UK end of IPM Group promised.
Swiss mouse-maker – shame on the person who said it was a natural progression for a nation of cuckoo clock makers – Logitech International SA says it expects double-digit group net profit for the current fiscal year: chairman Daniel Borel said in Zrich that Logitech aimed for a net profit margin of over 26% compared with 25.9% in the previous year, to March 31; sales this year should grow modestly from last year when calculated in Swiss francs, the chairman said.
Columbia, South Carolina-based Policy Management Systems Corp has sold its Health Insurance Systems unit and expects to record a pre-tax gain of about $8.4m, offset by special pre-tax charges of $8.5m to $9.5m, principally related to legal fees and other payments unrelated to the sale; the health division recorded revenues of $3.8m in the first quarter of 1995 or less than 3% of the c
ompany’s total revenue for the quarter, the buyer of the business has not been identified.
Hutchison Whampoa Ltd and British Aerospace Plc – which was thought to be a keen seller of its 30% – have bought Barclays Bank Plc’s 5.0% stake in Hutchison Telecommunications UK Ltd: the stake was taken up in proportion to existing holdings; Hutchison now has 68.42%, and British Aerospace has 31.58%;
De La Rue Plc says it will pay $30m in cash for cash-handling equipment maker Brandt Inc and will also repay $15m of Brandt long-term debt.
China Internet Corporation Ltd, an arm of China’s official Xinhua News Agency, is planning to provide commercial advertising and information services through the Internet, Reuters reports from Hong Kong: the company says the service will enable members to display their products and services using text and full colour photographs to potential customers all over the world using the World Wide Web, and it later plans to launch translation and research services and a private electronic mail network in China; the Hong Kong-based China Internet Corp will also provide Internet access to subscribers outside China, but subscribers inside China will only be able to access the private China Internet network because of limitations in technology and the sensitivity of the Peking authorities to a free flow of information.
Pakistani authorities on Sunday suspended all cellular telephone, payphone and pager services in the violence-plagued city of Karachi, Reuters reports: newspapers said the authorities ordered the move because armed militants were using the services for their operations: the authorities later said that the shut-down was to be indefinite.
Denver-based Entex Information Services Inc has revised the terms for its acquisition of fellow systems supplier and integrator Random Access Inc downwards to $3.25 a share cash from $3.50, making the deal worth about $22m: the revision of the agreement followed discussions between the two after it was found that Random Access would most likely incur a significant loss for the quarter ended May 31, causing it to fail to satisfy some conditions in the original agreement, specifically the one related to net worth.
GTE Corp began operating its San Diego cellular network on July 1 after its series of asset swaps with US West Inc: GTE exchanged cellular assets in Oregon, Minnesota, New Mexico and Washington for 100% of US West’s cellular assets in San Diego, which is the 13th-largest cellular market in the US.
Rupert Murdoch’s Delphi Internet Services Inc is limping a poor fourth with only 100,000 subsribers where the Big Three on-line services are all between 1.5m and 3m, but he has appointed Anthea Disney, editor in chief of TV Guide, to be the top editor at Delphi: Ms Disney hails from Surrey and first came to prominence as US showbiz correspondent for the Daily Mail, and has also been executive producer of Fox Television’s A Current Affair; Delphi is part of the package that is intended to get MCI Communications Corp into the fun-and-games end of the business in return for its proposed $2,000m investment in News Corp; it has licensed the Netscape Navigator to enable subscribers to browse the World Wide Web services.
The march of technology is a killer – a company killer, that is, spurring the eye-catching opening to a San Jose Mercury News piece If disk-drive makers get any better at increasing the capacity of their products and driving down costs, they might just go broke: shipments of hard disks increased 35% last year to 69m units worldwide according to Dataquest Inc, yet the industry’s total revenue dropped 4% under the force of competition, and at its annual disk-drive forecast conference in Monterey, the information technology research outfit’s chief disk-drive analyst warned that the industry could once again be headed for overcapacity – manufacturers are planning to build 90m units in 1995, and that could outstrip even the growth in demand for computer systems – It’s like
a combination of Alzheimer’s disease and deja vu – we’ve forgotten how terrible it was all over again, observed Phil Devin, vice-president of the Dataquest storage service.
Tandem Computers Inc has opened its first sales and support office in Russia: its Austrian subsidiary in Vienna has been actively conducting business in the former Soviet Union since 1993, and Tandem’s Moscow office is currently staffed by Russian sales, project management, A lliance Partner, and administrative personnel, augmented by Tandem support representatives from Austria and the UK; local resellers are to be recruited in the months ahead.
National Westminster Bank Plc has gone to Tandem Computers Inc for its fault-tolerant Himalaya computers, but not the generation launched this year: instead the high street banker’s technology division has paid ú6.5m for the K10000 and K1000 models, and will use them to reduce its three data processing centres from three to two, both outside London; the bank will run SWIFT Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, point of sale credit and debit transactions, and automated teller transactions that are run in co-operation with two other UK banks.
