As Unisys Corp pushes ahead to establish a joint venture in Hungary, the company’s Czech operation is still negotiating to gain tax-free status after restructuring as a joint venture in both the Czech and Slovak Republics in an announcement dated June 2, but concluded in the Czech Republic at the beginning of this year. General manager Giorg Schoiswohl denied that the original objective in forming a joint venture with the Czech software house T-Soft was to secure tax concessions, and maintained he was still hoping for a successsful conculsion to the talks. The outcome of the negotiations is commercially significant, as Unisys is believed to have won contracts valued at around $100m the former Czech & Slovak Federal Republic last year – accroding to government computing advisor Jaroslav Zeleny – and now has 200 employees and secondments. Unisys itself refuses to reveal revenue figures. Key accounts include the Statni Banka Ceskoslovenska (State Bank of the CSFR), the Postovni Banka (Post Office Bank), the Ceska Statni Sporitelna (Czech Savings Bank) and CSA (Czechoslovak Airlines). The State Bank installation is based on dual processor A16 mainframes while the Czech Savings bank is using an A19 mainframe-based system; the latter project is valued at $90m in Unisys’s 1992 annual report. However, with most of the major banks how already committed to projects, Unisys may be pushed to maintain such impressive momentum unless it is able to make headway in securing government and telecommunications-related accounts with the machines that it buys OEM from Sequent Computer Systems Corp. One potentially worrying development for Unisys is that Czech systems integrator APP Group – widely regarded as most successful of the local integrators – has formed a subsidiary to sell Sequent hardware and is currently pitching for a major account with Cez, the Czech energy supply company, in conjunction with Coopers & Lybrand, for which it is tipped to propose Sequent units running the Oracle Corp database. Schoiswohl said that he was unaware of this competition, and that he did not know whether Unisys’s understanding was that it had exclusive rights to sell Symmetry in the Czech Republic.
