Jugding by its aggressive litigatious pursuit of Advanced Micro Devices Inc and NEC Corp, Intel Corp clearly has nothing more to learn from its powerful mentor IBM Corp, and the two are amicably parting company – in a fiscal sense only, because IBM will remain one of Intel’s largest customers and the cross-licence agreements between the two will re-main in place. On Friday, IBM sold all its remaining unencumbered Intel shares to Salomon Brothers in a bought deal at $52.50 a share, a healthy $3 discount on the price ruling in the market, and Salomon immediately placed them with more than 50 institutions in the largest ever single sale of stock in a company traded on the US Over The Counter market. The total sold, 5.9m shares, brought IBM $309.7m, and left it with 7.8m shares, 7.1% of the total, which it needs to fulfil the terms of a February 1986 Eurobond offering convertible into Intel shares. In June, Intel paid IBM $361.6m to buy back 8.9m of its shares, at $40.62 a time.
