Sun Microsystems Inc is reportedly planning to source some of its workstations from Taiwan. According to the Commercial Times in Taipei, Mitac International Corp will sign a $1bn deal to make workstations for the Mountain View company. The plan is said to be for Mitac to manufacture 500,000 workstations using the UltraSparc processor for Sun between the second half of this year and the end of 1998. Mitac declined to confirm the Sun deal, saying it was negotiating several deals with several companies on a variety of computer products. Meanwhile there is great excitement in Taiwan over Synnex Information Technologies Inc buying those distribution businesses from Merisel Inc, including the fading Computerland franchise chain (CI No 3,080) because it turns out that Synnex is the US unit of Mitac International. Synnex gets a majority stake in Merisel FAB, which runs the Computerland franchise and Datago Aggregation Businesses. Mitac says annual sales at its US unit will soar past $2bn in 1997 from $1bn in 1996, partly as a result of it acquiring the Merisel units.
