Siemens Nixdorf Informations Systems AG is cooking a big deal with Bell Atlantic Corp, the company revealed at Hannover yesterday, but is not prepared to say more for a few days. It also does not rule out other acquisitions to follow its purchase of Pyramid Technology Corp. The Siemens AG computer company says sales in the first five months of its current fiscal year rose 9% from a year ago and orders rose 18% – putting it ahead of plan. But that does not mean that it can relent on cost-cutting: another 3,000 jobs are to go this year. All divisions apart from mainframes are contributing to sales growth, and even that is doing better than most. The personal computer division turned in the largest sales increase, growing 57%, compared with 55% last year, but margins are painfully thin, and it is not an area that a lot of companies get rich on. The target is more than 1m units a year.
