Swiss watchmaker Societe Suisse Microelectronique et d’Horlogerie SA and Siemens AG created a joint venture for producing small telecommunications devices under the Swatch name: the new Swatch Telecom AG will be equally held by the two; Siemens sees it doing at least $175m a year within three years. – o – Bit embarrassing – Unipalm Group Plc says its ongoing bid talks may lead to an offer, but only of about 450 pence per share, and the price of shares in the Cambridge Internet access provider plunged 129 pence to 422 pence on Friday: fevered press reports have suggested prices as high as #7 to #9 a share; names that have been canvassed include Microsoft Corp, AT&T Corp, British Telecommunications Plc, NetCom On-Line Communications Service Inc, and the relatively conservative price sounds British or European. – o – As we have said before, trying to call the potential bidder for Unipalm Group Plc is a complete mug’s game because you could write a list of 30 companies that might well be interested before you even paused, but the conservative price tends to narrow the field a little – some of the names that have been mentioned could be expected to be more extravagant, so, given the Cambridge connection and the firm’s surging interest in telecommunications services, a very small flutter on Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA could pay off. – o – German computer maker Escom AG has reported pre-tax losses for the six months to June 30 of the equivalent of $2.7m against profit last time of $4.1m on turnover up 31.6% at $789.0: the company predicted full year sales up 47.6% to $2,114m and cited lower margins, development costs and expansion costs as contributing to its six month losses. – o – Robert Hoogstraten, marketing director of Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, stepped down as of Saturday as part of a reorganisation of the company’s marketing into three primary divisions, covering Europe, Africa and the Middle East. – o – Powersoft Corp’s PowerBuilder for Unix is up for Solaris from $3,300. – o – Amdahl Corp says it sees no need to increase its bid for DMR Group Inc as it controls enough of the company’s voting rights and shares to complete a takeover this month; if DMR’s minority shareholders do not tender to the bid, it may operate DMR as an Amdahl subsidiary with a publically-traded stub. – o – Stet SpA rather surprisingly outbid Telefonica de Espana SA as well as MCI Communications Corp for a 50% stake in Bolivia’s Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones state-run telephone company: Stet offered $610m, MCI $303m and Telefonica $162.5m; Entel has a book value of $132m; it will have a six-year communications monopoly while it addresses the shame that Bolivia has only four phones per 100 people. – o – Shares of NexGen Inc fell $2.375 to $18.25 on Nasdaq at midday Friday after the Milpitas firm warned it expects to report earnings for its fiscal first quarter ending September 30 lower than analysts’ consensus estimate of a $0.27 per share loss, blaming price cuts it has had to make in response to aggressive product pricing by Intel Corp, which put significant price pressure on its 90MHz Nx586 processor. – o – The entertainment joint venture between Walt Disney Co, BellSouth Corp , GTE Corp, SBC Communications Inc and Ameritech Corp has settled on a name: it will be Americast. – o – AmeriQuest Technologies Inc still wants to acquire Horsham, Pennsylvania-based Robec Inc, but will not be able to close the deal immediately because AmeriQuest finds it does not have sufficient available common shares to complete the deal and has not yet been able to secure a listing of the AmeriQuest shares to be issued in the acquisition; Robec is a US-wide distributor of microcomputers, peripherals and accessories to value-added resellers, dealers and retailers of computers. – o – Proteus International Plc shares put on 38 pence at 102p after it said it expects to conclude five revenue-earning agreements before the end of its financial year in March, four to be signed in 1995; it also said it had reached key development milestones in product test
ing and will reduce research and development projects to five from 12, meaning that the number of employees will fall to 56 from 81. – o – Sony Corp rates the Playstation games machine its most important product since the legendary behaviour-altering Walkman, and it is spending #20m on the Euro-launch. – o – Digital Equipment Corp has a letter of intent to develop a desktop colour laser printer using Electronics for Imaging Inc’s Fiery XJE Controller: terms were not disclosed. – o – Amazing – the company is bust, near as makes no difference – at least to the extent that customers were becoming reluctant to do business with it, but is now guaranteed a sercure future – and yet a Convex Computer Corp shareholder is suing the company and Hewlett-Packard Co, alleging that Hewlett’s proposed purchase price for the Richardson, Texas company is inadequate; the lawsuit, which also names some Convex officers and directors, was filed by shareholder Joanne Hoffman and seeks class-action status on behalf of other Convex shareholders – the share exchange values Convex at $4.83 a share, and the shares are currently at $4.50 – but just let them watch what happens to the share price if Hewlett walks away. – o – In one of its last acts, the US Office of Technology Assessment – which went out of business on Friday, killed by Republican budget cutters – called into question the Pentagon’s programme to seed-fund and foster an American flat-panel display industry for national security reasons, arguing that the things were now commodity items and there were now second and third sources in the shape of South Korea and Taiwan: while we look at such state subsidies and featherbedding with grave suspicion, the report does rather seem to miss the point – how much time do the staff of the Office spend in front of today’s liquid crystal displays, and can’t they see how utterly inadequate and inherently horrible the things are – the great hope of the US programme is that it will come up with an incomparably better technology. – o – The bilateral semiconductor accord between Japan and the US should be terminated after the five-year pact expires next year, said the chairman of Electronic Industries Association of Japan: The pact has already done its job, and it does not have to be continued, Norio Ohga, who is also the chairman of Sony Corp, told a news conference. – o – Oracle Corp reports a multimillion dollar worldwide license and services agreement under which Xerox Corp will replace its ancient mainframe systems worldwide with new Oracle client-server applications. – o – Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based superminimaker Encore Computer Corp says it is building a direct sales force taken from leading storage vendors to sell its diversification and sell its new family of Infinity storage products: the company’s aim is to expand the number of sales offices in key cities around the country including New York, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Atlanta, Houston and Dallas; it said a significant number of trained sales and support people have already been hired and an aggressive (they press gang people, presumably) recruiting programme is on-going as are continuing discussions with potential OEM partners to distribute the new storage products; Encore also added a new Infinity Gateway entry-level storage system for enterprise-wide data access for Unix system users. – o – On the occasion of their first meeting with newly-appointed France Telecom chief executive Michel Bon, two of the unions, Force Ouvrier and the Confederation Francaise Democratique de Travail both reaffirmed their hostility to any change in the operator’s status: the former reminded Bon of its opposition to any privatisation of the public operator and called for the the maintenance of its employees’ civil servant status; for its part, the latter advised Bon that he must renew internal confidence; Bon is scheduled to meet the other trades unions between now and October 9. – o – Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp has bowed to pressure and says it decided to liberalise other telecommunications compan
ies’ access to its local telephone networks: Nippon Telegraph has a virtual monopoly on Japan’s local call market. – o – Bellevue, Washington-based Attachmate Corp, provider of communications software, has announced a new Pentium-based server, pre-installed with its Remote LAN Node 4.0 software (CI No 2,758), enabling systems administrators to configure remote access for Ethernet or Token Ring networks over any medium including modems, cellular, ISDN, X.25 and switched 56Kbps: the Server 4.0 uses a 75MHz Pentium system from Dell Computer Corp and is delivered fully configured by Attachmate; the plug and play system enables remote users to run applications, access the host, send or receive electronic mail messages, and perform tasks as if they were cabled to the local net, and also functions as a modem pool server enabling local network-attached users to dial out to public information services; it supports native ISDN, enhanced NetWare client install, SNMP management and is scalable up to 32 simultaneous connections per server; it comes in four, eight, 16, 24 or 32 port systems and is out now at from $4,575 for a four-port system to $17,935 for a 32-port system, Attachmate said.
