Alcatel NV, which already has substantial deals cooking in the Comecon countries, is close to an pact on digital telephone exchanges in the Soviet Union that could be worth $1,000m over the next 10 years, according to the Financial Times: it is negotiating the building of a System 12 assembly plant in Leningrad with annual capacity of 1m to 1.5m lines as the second phase of an agreement that would initially involve the export of 250,000 lines of System 12 exchanges from Alcatel’s Bell Telephone Manufacturing Company in Belgium.
