It’s hard to have any confidence about the GEC Plc alliance with Siemens AG in the wake of the news from Pittsburgh that the joint ventures that were being discussed with Westinghouse Electric Corp have been scaled back to the point where they now involve simply a pair of distribution agreements, Westinghouse taking on some Simatic programmable comtrollers for the US market and Siemens taking some circuit breakers: when one recalls that broadbrush agreements between Siemens and GTE Corp on telecommunications and Allied Signal Corp on automative products also ended up as much less than had been suggested when talks were first announced, coupled with GEC’s rotten record on joint ventures with the then Fairchild Camera & Instrument and Hitachi Ltd on TV sets, plus the absurd failure to cut an acceptable deal with Philips NV on medical electronics, it is very hard to see the proposed collaborations between GEC and Siemens turning out anything like so rosy as the next bid documents for Plessey Co will seek to make them look – and the same question mark also hangs over the working out of the proposed GEC alliances with General Electric Co Inc.
