There are several conflicts of interest that would make any deal very problematic, but shares in Cable & Wireless Plc added tenpence to 377p yesterday on gossip that British Telecommunications Plc may bid for the company: main reason for a bid would be British Telecom’s desire to increase its Far Eastern presence, but it would almost certainly have to sell Mercury Communications Ltd, and it would also upset the partnerships apple cart in Germany.
IBM Corp’s OS/2 Warp seems to be winning big in one market, Germany: the company reports big orders from Deutsche Bank Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken, Bayerischen Vereinsbank, Bayerischen Hypotheken- und Wechselbank AG, Allianz AG, BFG Bank AG and retail group Karstadt AG; Vobis Computer AG also said it would pre-load PC-DOS rather than MS-DOS in its machines, but as it still intends to pre-load Windows95, that does not mean too much; IBM still says it hopes to win 40% of the European market with OS/2 Warp in the battle with Microsoft Corp and Windows95 – it says that in Germany alone, its key business software clients will have installed at least 1m copies of Warp by the end of next year; it has also picked up an office suite for OS/2 from Star Div ision GmbH which it will market as Star Office – initially in just Germany, but ultimately worldwide.
European Industry Commissioner Martin Bangemann has now warned state-owned France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom AG that their Atlas joint venture could be in danger if liberalisation of the telecommunications infrastructure in Germany and France was not speeded up: he said that a decision on Atlas would be very difficult if they did not embark on liberalisation this year.
The Vebacom GmbH joint venture of Veba AG and Cable & Wireless Plc has agreed with Deutsche Bahn AG to set up a joint venture this year to install telephone lines along the railway lines: the new joint venture company will be based in Leipzig, and Vebacom will have 60%.
Northern Telecom Ltd and Ameritech Inc have signed a four-year contract with an estimated value of up to $200m for Northern to upgrade Ameritech’s DMS-100 digital switching system: Northern Telecom will upgrade Ameritech processors in its five-state service area, provide engineering support and upgrade processors as technology advances; Ameritech may also buy hardware over the life of the contract.
Toshiba Corp is considering raising its export prices of semiconductors to the US to cope with the yen’s recent surge against the dollar: Japan’s biggest chip maker NEC Corp plans to raise export prices of memory chips to the US for the same quarter, but has yet to decide by how much; the value of Toshiba’s semiconductor exports is expected to total $4,000m in the current fiscal year to March 31; the rest of Japan’s five major semiconductor producers – Hitachi Ltd, Fujitsu Ltd and Mitsubishi Electric Corp – have not decided whether they will increase export prices; electronics firm Kyocera Corp will raise export prices in overseas currencies by an average 10% from April due to the sharply higher yen; Kyocera makes nearly 40% of its sales overseas.
AT&T Corp is expected to go ahead with its buyout of LIN Broadcasting Corp even though the latest appraisal of the wireless communications company values it at 18% more than AT&T’s original estimate, analysts said: on Tuesday, an investment bank valued LIN at about $6,800m, nearly splitting the $2,650m difference between estimates by LIN and AT&T in February; under previous agreements, AT&T has until April 21 to decide whether to acquire the 48% of LIN common stock it does not own at the private market price; it acquired 60% with acquisition of McCaw Cellular Communications Inc.
France Telecom is to invest $204.6m in the next three to four years to make tests on information highways: France Telecom’s main access provider to the Internet, a global network linking computers, is in talks with a large group of international companies about links to other on line data networks; France Telecom’s experime
nts are mainly aimed at creating an infrastructure for the information superhighway, so that others can use it to launch commercial services; Lyonnaise des Eaux SA unit Lyonnaise Communications and Bouygues SA subsidiary TF1 plan experiments mixing telecommunications with television, but these experiments have so far not been allowed by the government.
FIserv Inc acquired the BankLink Inc subsidiary of Chemical Banking Corp on undisclosed terms: New York City-based BankLink licenses cash management products, information reporting and transaction initiation services to US and international financial institutions, for resale on to their corporate customers.
The Omnitel-Pronto Italia mobile telephone company has lodged a complaint against a decision by government ministers last December on the launch of its digital system: Ministers gave the go-ahead to Omnitel’s sole competitor, state-controlled Telecom Italia SpA, to start marketing its own digital cellular system from next month, well before the Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA-led consortium will be ready for business; Omnitel complains that this is in violation of the idea of equal market opportunities.
Pacific Telecom Inc’s majority owner, PacifiCorp, will buy the 13% of Pacific Telecom’s shares it doesn’t already own for $30 cash per share under definitive merger agreement.
The head of Italy’s anti-trust body, former Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, is worried by the bid from four Italian banks to buy the state’s majority stake in telecommunications firm Stet Spa: The offer by the banks leaves a question mark dangling in the air which worries me; they say they will place the stock (with other companies), but with whom? Amato said in an interview with newspaper La Repubblica; Amato added that if the stock was destined for Stet suppliers or to other telecommunications firms he would look to block the sale; Mediobanca, Banca di Roma, Credito Italiano and Banca Commerciale Italiana earlier this week offered to buy the state’s 61.3% holding in Stet’s ordinary capital.
San Diego-based Code Division Multiple Access developer Qualcomm Inc is expanding its workforce by 20% in the next several months in response to rapid industry growth: it currently employs some 2,000 staff.
Correction: as well as giving the General Motors Corp firm a ú500m 10-year facilities management contract, Lucas Industries Plc is negotiating to sell its Lucas Management Systems and consultancy to Electronic Data Systems Corp; yesterday’s story said the putative buyer was not named (CI No 2,619).
Presumably Associated Press and anyone else that picks up the item will receive a writ too – according to the newswire, Thomas Wallace and his sons, Terry, Todd and Troy of Omaha, Nebraska have filed a $40m lawsuit against Compton NewMedia Inc, its owner, Tribune Co and Best Buy Inc, where he bought the offending CD-ROM encyclopaedia: he wants to be set up for life in compensation for the emotional distress he and his sons suffered when, mistyping, he found citations of a word no longer used in polite society under Drama, Martin Luther King Jr, Black Americans or African Americans and English Literature when he tried to look up the Niger River.
