Philips NV declined comment yesterday on a report in Dutch daily de Volkskrant that it was negotiating to pay cash for a controlling 51% stake in Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA to create an $8,000m-a-year computer and office equipment company comparable in size to the emerging Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme GmbH. The downside is that any such move would go down very badly with Philips shareholders and that it would put together two weak companies with very similar product lines, leaving big scope for rationalisation but creating a company amounting to less than the sum of its parts. Both are in personal computers and banking terminals and have very similar Unix families. Systems said it had founded a Laboratory for Unix Integration at its marketing headquarters in Eindhoven to benchmark real-world commercial applications and integrate business systems. It will invest $8m in the centre, which will concentrate on Informix and Oracle databases, Uniplex office automation, and SNA, Open, and TCP/IP communications.
