ICL’s innovative initiative to allow Poland to assemble ME29 computers and pay for them with furniture has been widely lauded as the kind of countertrade deal that can help the economies of the liberalising Comecon countries back on their feet, and the company has been rewarded with orders worth UKP1.4m for DRS 300 microcomputers from three Polish banks. The machines will run banking applications developed jointly with Polish software house Softbank. ICL has also supplied the first Automatic Teller Machine to Poland under its agreement with Diebold Inc (CI No 1,330). The three banks are Bank PKO BP, its Bank PKO SA hard currency affiliate, which has branches in Australia, Germany, France, Israel and the US, and the Wielkopolski Bank Kreditowy.
