Texas Instruments Inc, which seems to make more money policing its patent portfolio than it does from actually making and selling chips, is suing Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and two of the Korean company’s US subsidiaries for allegedly infringing several patents on semiconductor fabrication, and plans to file a complaint with the International Trade Commission asking it to prevent Samsung from importing allegedly infringing chips into the US – which would be a disaster if it were to do so since the chips at issue are dynamic memory chips and Samsung is now the biggest source of memory chips worldwide; the whole affair is one of those silly stand-offs, because a five-year cross licensing agreement with Samsung expired on December 31 and Texas says extensive talks with Samsung over renewal of the agreement failed to resolve the issue.
Prospects for speedy passage of the US telecommunications reform bill are more clouded again after House and Senate leaders indicated that they might try to revamp the proposed bill, a process likely to bog it down in new controversy and disagreement: Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, appearing with House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said on Thursday there are a number of problems in the legislation that could have been resolved differently by congressional negotiators.
The Irish Industrial Development Authority aims to support the creation of 31,000 new first-time jobs between 1996 and 1998, a rise of 22% on the previous three-year period; it secured 114 new investment projects in 1995, and says Ireland won 14% of all greenfield manufacturing investment in Europe.
Shares in Escom AG tumbled out of bed, falling 23% yesterday in response to Friday’s suprise announcement that it would report a 1995 loss of around $32m; the shares were trading 5.70 marks lower at 17.80 marks, well below its lowest traded level in 1995, when the price had dipped to 21.67 marks.
ADC Telecommunications Inc is suing the Siecor Corp joint partnership of Siemens AG and Corning Inc, alleging infringement of an ADC patent for a fibre optic connector.
India has so screwed up its telephone privatisation programme that a tender for licences to offer basic telephone service on Monday failed to attract any bids for eight of 13 regions on the auction block.
Vodafone Group Plc says it made more than 286,000 gross new connections in the fourth quarter of 1995, and finished the year with a total subscriber base of 2.33m, having added 694,000 new subscribers in 1995; more than 1.15m subscribers are connected to the LowCall tariff, while over 400,000 are connected to its digital services.
Meantime Cellnet Mobile Communications Ltd made 150,900 gross new connections in December, and now has 2.3m customers, beating Vodafone by achieving 740,000 net new connections – but the company warned that the overall market for cellular telephones in the UK had taken a downward turn in December.
General Electric Co Inc yesterday launched a claimed-to-be-secure Internet-based network for electronic commerce, the GE TradingProcess Network, saying it expects the network to handle more than $1,000m in transactions this year.
China will eventually have the world’s biggest cellular network in terms of area, the People’s Daily reckons: the paper says that from Monday, the number of places where the 100,000 users of digital cellular telephones could make calls was expanded to 15 cities and provinces, including Peking, Shanghai and Tianjin, and by the end of September, that network will be expanded to 30 cities, provinces and regions, while by January 10, owners of China’s 3.4m analogue cellular telephones will be able to call anywhere on the Chinese mainland and the network will be expanded to give the widest coverage of any such system in the world, it said.
AT&T Corp sold the AT&T Corporate Center in downtown Chicago to Monroe & Adams, a firm affiliated to the Government of Singapore Investment Corp: the sale, which was completed on December 21 for a reported $540m, involves two buildings side by side, which are 97% occupied; they are situated side-by-side and share a common lobby and AT&T, which has employees in both buildings, has no plans to relocate.
Deutsche Morgan Grenfell and the Development Finance Corp of Ceylon have won the tender to restructure Sri Lanka’s telecommunications industry: the team is required first to sell off at least 20 percent of Sri Lanka Telecom, which has a monopoly of fixed telephone lines, and also to improve the management.
Spectrum Information Technologies Inc’s former president, Peter Caserta, the man that attracted John Sculley aboard, has been named in a civil racketeering lawsuit that alleges a financial services firm he ran scammed tens of thousands of dollars from small businesses, the Wall Street Journal reported: the suit was filed by eight technology companies against Caserta Group.
The biggest bar to the Japanese leaping aboard the information superhighway is not the language barrier or lack of computing skills, but Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp: local calls cost a ridiculous 10 cents a minute in Japan, making extended surfing an expensive activity; even so, according to Reuter, there are now over 130 Internet access providers, up from just five a year ago, and a survey by the Japan Investor Relations Association shows over 80% of listed Japanese companies surveyed have or will have an Internet presence by April.
IPC Corp Ltd reports that its IPC Corp (Australian) Pty Ltd unit agreed on December 29 to sell its chain of 25 retail outlets to private Australian company Inter Pacific C&C for about $11.5m as part of the subsidiary’s rationalisation programme and its strategy to concentrate on the growing home and small office-home office markets.
Alpharel Inc, San Diego is to spend about $1m and issue shares worth about $550,000 in an attempt to induce employees of its newly acquired Trimco Group Plc here in London to stay with the group: Trimco supplies open imaging software and employs about 90 staff; Alpharel paid $14.65m, made up of $5.55m in cash, a $1.0m convertible note and 1.62m new common shares.
The Metadata Council is still working on its metadata interchange specification, which was originally due by year-end, but has now been put back to the end of the month.
GTI Corp, the San Diego company majority owned by Telemetrix Plc, has completed the divestiture of its electronic components and equipment business to a newly-formed company established management of the new Component InterTechnologies Inc and the Lincolnshire Equity Fund LP for $12.5m plus assumption of liabilities: the new company will continue to operate the electronic components and equipment business from existing facilities in Hadley, Pennsylvania, Hartselle, Alabama and in the Irish Republic.
Getting pretty ordinary, these extraordinary charges IBM Corp keeps taking for restructuring and lay-offs, and the Wall Street Journal points out that they are beginning to make investors and analysts look askance at the company, and suspect that the write-offs are made in part in order to flatter profits in the periods when there is a write-off respite, and make the company look more profitable that it really is: it is instructive to look at more successful companies like Hewlett-Packard Co and ICL Plc, which have each steadily reduced their workforces over the past decade even as they hired new people in growing areas of their businesses – but seldom have to resort to extraordinary charges, simply treating the cost of eliminating surplus staff as part of the normal process of running a high-technology firm.
Suspicions that the accountancy rules are being exploited to present IBM Corp’s figures in the best possible light are fuelled by the fact that Louis Gerstner’s last charge was RJR Nabisco Inc, the company that was acquired in a vast leveraged buy-out by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts: the purpose of such a piece of financial engineering is to dress the company up for resale at a very acceptable profit four or five years down the road, and the buyout trio needs no lessons in drawing up books to show a firm’s figures in the best possible light – nothing illegal or particularly reprehensible in any of this, although it can create a very unhappy environment for employees, but investors may prefer to steer clear of companies where it is suspected.
The UK cellular telephone network operator Vodafone Group Plc has plumped for ICL Plc’s Dais object request broker for use in its VodaService administration services.
Data General Corp is the latest to leap aboard the data warehousing bandwaggon, teaming with 22 companies to provide offerings under a Business Warehouse Programme for its new Pentium Pro AViiON servers.
Westborough, Massachusetts-based Arch Communications Group Inc, providing paging services in parts of New England and the southeastern US, is to buy Westlink Holdings Inc for $340m cash: San Diego-based Westlink provides paging services in 13 states west of the Mississippi River and in Mississippi; the acquisition was its second in 1995 – it bought Mobile Communications Holdings Inc for about $450m in April (CI No 2,638), and it reckons it will become the third largest paging company in the US, with more than 2.5m subscribers, on completion; Westlink, privately owned by management and investors led by Merrill Lynch Capital Partners LP, was formed in 1994 to buy the paging assets of US West Paging Inc.
