General Motors Corp’s Hughes Aircraft Co accompanied news of a planned 9,000 redundancies with a commitment to divest non-core activities: the company declined to define precisely what it now saw as core activities, but it seems likely that its Hughes LAN Systems in Mountain View, California is one of the units on the block; Hughes says it has already held talks with parties interested in buying several of non-core business activities; the man wielding the axe at Hughes is of course Michael Armstrong, who quit IBM Corp’s top management to take the job at Hughes last year.
