Sony Corp President Nobuyuki Idei says the company will likely have to move more of its business activities overseas to try to combat the effects of the soaraway yen, adding chillingly that he would not be surprised if the yen strengthened to 50 against the dollar without giving a time-frame – it’s at around 85 to the dollar now, a number that would have been unthinkable only weeks ago; the key functions are still in Tokyo, Idei, who took over as president on Monday, told Reuters – from now we have to move more of these abroad, like marketing and information centres – the yen has risen from 360 to the dollar when I was young to 85 now – the dollar has kept getting weaker against the yen and I don’t think this trend will stop easily – Sony has to take action as soon as possible; Sony generates 73% of its revenues from overseas activities, even though 58% of production was in Japan in 1994.
And Toshiba Corp said it will increase imports of electronic parts and materials, especially from Asian countries, to meet the challenge of the yen’s rise: the company plans to raise parts and materials imports to $263m in the fiscal year to March 31 1996 and $306m in 1996-97 from $212.5m in the 1994-95 year which ended at the end of March.
Portugal Telecom has absorbed the 50.04% state stake in external telecommunications operator Companhia Portuguesa de Radio Marconi SA as part of the process to sell off 30% of the state telephone company; Portugal Telecom plans to buy out the outside shareholders on May 25.
SAS Institute Inc is to offer its SAS system for business decision-making in large enterprises on Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh: the new release supports Apple’s 68000-based Macintosh and provides native support for the Power Macintosh; SAS System for the Macintosh is licensed on an annual basis with fees determined by number of components and number of copies licensed – the first-year fee for the SAS System begins at $985, with significant discounts for multiple copies – falling to less than $75 when you order 500 copies or more.
Fremont, California-based Alaris Inc, successor company to Everex Systems Inc, is mobilising IBM Corp’s 100MHz Blue Lightning iAPX-86-compatible microprocessor in a new Leopard VIP-BL100: the Blue Lightning is integrated onto a plug-in sub-assembly board called Vortex, with a maths co-processor, and the Leopard VIP-BL100 is available as a motherboard, a bare-bones unit, or complete system; the board lists at $370, the basic system with system board, 200W power supply and a mini-desktop or mini-tower case is $450, and a complete system will be offered at $1,587.
Problem with so much of the high-flown verbiage that comes out of Brussels (this is actually from the Luxembourg annexe) is that you look at it, look at it again and are left asking what does it mean? Wire reports say that a Council of Culture Ministers on Tuesday asked the European Commission to map Europe’s existing multimedia terrain to give governments a better idea of how to develop industries such as CD-ROM and electronic information exchange so that governments then could create a network on which cultural exchanges such as those between museums and libraries would flourish, and where long-distance education or training would be accessible for the public – that’s the Associated Press version; Reuters has it that the Commission has been asked to prepare a state of play report for the next meeting in June and to set up a special working group that would be given a year to look into the technical and legal challenge these new forms of information and culture pose; member states and the Community have important and catalytic roles in developing the creation, the production and the distribution of quality multimedia cultural works, the 15 ministers resolved – is anyone out there any the wiser?
Activision Inc has signed a long-term joint development agreement and a separate licensing agreement with video games developer Shiny Entertainment Inc, which will develop a next-gene
ration action engine to drive video games produced for the Sega Enterprises Ltd Saturn, the Sony Corp PSX and the Nintendo Co Ultra-64 machines; Activision will hold exclusive rights to use the engine for the development, production and publishing of its products and Shiny will retain ownership of the engine and the right to use the technology; Activision also gets worldwide rights to convert Shiny’s Earthworm Jim video game to run under Windows95.
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp has launched a trial of Personal Handy Phone in Malaysia with the help of a local university, holding a one-month trial on its campus.
Wang Laboratories Inc reports that Eastman Kodak Co has chosen Wang’s software to be the basis of Kodak Imagelink for digital imaging by computer: Wang says the arrangement will enable the companies to offer customers a broad set of document imaging systems spanning microfilm to digital-based media and running on all leading industry computers; Kodak will use Wang’s Open/image, Open/workflow and Open/coldplus software to develop systems as part of its new Business Imaging Solutions strategy, Wang Labs declared.
The head of the US Senate Commerce Committee says there will be no vote on communications laws before the Senate adjourns this week for the spring recess: the bill is expected to be passed in late April or May after a hard-fought debate; the House of Representatives hopes to present its bill in early May.
Corporate Services Group Plc’s Sight & Sound computer training subsidiary has won a joint marketing agreement with Amstrad Direct, the direct sales division of Amstrad Plc: Amstrad will promote use of Sight & Sound computer training systems on all its newly-launched PC9486i personal computers sold via Amstrad Direct, and the company has equipped all its training centres with PC9486i systems and software.
Pacific Bell Inc has a special purpose trust of about $2,000m, arranged by Merrill Lynch & Co, to fund development of its broadband network in California: the trust is structured along the lines of a project finance issue, which enables Pacific Bell to delay financing and risk until the network is operational – the Pacific Telesis Group Inc company won’t take over the obligations of the trust until AT&T Corp, which is developing the technology for the network, delivers an operating guarantee- that likely won’t be until 1997 or 1998.
Still more successful – and legal – blackmail: Compression Labs Inc settled a shareholder class action filed in 1992, for $4.8m, all to be paid by its insurer, which will receive a three-year warrant for 195,000 new shares at prices higher than the current one; commenting, chairman John Tyson says We have always believed that this lawsuit was frivolous, and was filed merely as a result of a decline in our stock price in 1992 – although we believe that we would have succeeded at a trial, the uncertainty of doing so made it prudent to enter into a settlement at this time.
Northern Telecom Ltd has an order from US West Inc for 16,000 Millennium intelligent pay phones for installation in its 14-state region; no value for the order was given.
Sprint Corp is expanding its data service in Eastern Asia with a contract in Vietnam and has extended service in several other countries: it has a multi-million dollar contract with Vietnam Posts & Telecommunications to provide a nationwide high-speed data network and multimedia system, and global data services will be extended to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and the Philippines, meeting a growing demand for telecommunications services in the region; the total number of countries with access to SprintNet for Frame Relay services is now 26, and Sprint now has a presence in 47 countries.
There is no truth to that story at all – it’s absolutely unfounded, a spokesman for Canon Inc told Dow Jones & Co in response to market gossip that Canon was about to acquire Apple Computer Inc, adding that he was shocked to hear it: as Apple shares were jumping f
irst in London and then in New York, cooler heads suggested that Canon, long a major Apple partner in Japan, might well be about to license Mac OS – it already has a majority stake with Firepower Systems Inc, which is building PowerPC-based machines.
One after another, US technology companies step forward with tales of woe about the first quarter, and one after another their share prices tumble like blossoms after a hard night’s frost: shares of Parsippany, New Jersey-based Dialogic Corp lost 20% of their value after the developer of computer-integrated telephony products warned that its first-quarter profits would be below Wall Street’s estimates; the shares slumped $6.50 to $22.50 as it said it expects to report first-quarter earnings of 18 cents to 19 cents a share compared with 22 cents a share a year ago and analysts’ forecasts of 22 to 24 cents.
Acer Inc reports a monthly sales record of $162m for March, up 120% on March 1994; the previous monthly sales record was set in November.
And shares in Kirkland, Washington-based Wall Data Inc plunged after the communications software developer warned that it may report a loss for the latest quarter, citing poor North American sales: the shares crunched down 44%, $19.25 to bottom out at $22.50; it expects profits for the first quarter to range from a loss of 2 cents a share to break-even on revenues of $21.9m; a year ago, it lost 4 cents a share after a 24-cent charge, on $17.2m.
The seven Baby Bells are expected to announce plans to sell their jointly-owned Bell Communications Research Inc, the Wall Street Journal reported: the board of Bellcore was due to take a final vote on Wednesday night, knowledgeable executives said, but it is not clear whether the sale will be by flotation, trade sale or the sale of a major stake.
Thomson Consumer Electronics SA and Hitachi Ltd say they have successfully demonstrated a digital tape recorder to the new D-VHS standard.
Dell Computer KK is reducing prices on its desktop product line in Japan by 17% on average, and up to 23.6%.
The soaraway yen is causing anyone that manufacturers in Japan such pain that many are seeking to renegotiate export prices upwards: NEC Corp, Toshiba Corp, Hitachi Ltd, Fujitsu Ltd, Mitsubishi Electric Corp and Oki Electric Industry Co are in various stages of talks with their overseas customers about raising memory chip prices 5% to 10%.
Prodigy Services Co yesterday launched a new pricing plan for heavy users that bills on-line time at the equivalent of $1 an hour: the new 30/30 Plan provides 30 hours of monthly usage for $30 and additional hours after 30 are $2.95 each.
The European Commission has launched legal action against Italy, Greece, Germany and Spain for failure to apply Community telecommunications liberalisation rules, and a Commission official said further legal action is being considered against other members that have not sufficiently separated market regulators from telecommunications operators – the situation is common to almost all member states, he added, the main exception being the UK, which has an Office of Telecommunications.
Manufacturing software specialist Marcam Corp, Newton, Massachusetts has won big support for its emerging Protean object-oriented development technology for production, logistics, maintenance and financials, which is designed to change with a business’s evolving requirements without the need for code to be rewritten, from NEC Corp, which is to invest to help enhance the environment further with Marcam, and will also use Protean to create software for its customers in non-manufacturing markets, and plans to use it itself in its systems integration and services business.
Tandy Corp says that sales for March rose 34% to $406.5m and sales from stores open a year ago rose 10%.
It looks as if Durham, North Carolina has lost out to Richmond, Virginia in the fierce bidding to give a home to Motorola Inc’s next $1,000m chip plant (CI No 2,590) – at least
that’s what the Richmond Times-Dispatch believes: it says that Governor George Allen will next week announce that Motorola will build the plant in West Creek Office Park, Goochland County, just outside Richmond, according to state government sources in Richmond; Motorola is saying only that it has no decision to announce.
In case you missed it, there’s a bit of a flap going on in Internet circles over Satan, which stands for Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks – sounds harmless enough, and the fact that it was released as freeware on the Internet on Wednesday sounds like cause for rejoicing: not so, say critics, because while the software probes your system for its weak points, by its very nature, it also shows tyro hackers how to break in to even relatively secure systems; it was created by former Silicon Graphics Inc employee Dan Farmer with Wietse Venema, a security expert at the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands – Farmer quit Silicon Graphics because the firm did not think much of his idea of releasing the program; Satan enables adminis trators of computers connected to the Internet to test their systems for security lapses, pointing out weaknesses and how a hacker might exploit them, and suggesting corrective steps – and while it is by no means unique, the worry is that it has such an easy-to-use interface that many more non-technical hackers can use it.
Commenting on its dismal 1994 figures (page seven) Sligos SA, engineering and information systems unit of Credit Lyonnais, said it expects a sharp recovery this year.
Charming – analysts attributed a rise in the shares of Alcatel Alsthom SA yesterday to expectations that its chairman Pierre Suard was going to be asked to resign after a special board meeting on April 18.
An oft-recurring debate at Apple Computer Inc has been whether the company should emphasise the bottom line – it has traditionally enjoyed much better margins than makers of iAPX-86-based personal computers because of the premium it has been able to charge for the extra functionality of the Macintosh – or market share: the latest reorganisation is being seen as a victory for the market sharers over the bottom-liners, at least for now, which may be why the shares fell $1.675 to $33.875 in heavy trading Tuesday.
It’s clearly taken them a week and some to convince themselves that it really did work: in a release dated April 5, Advanced Remote Technologies Inc, Campbell, California trumpets the intelligence that for the opening number at the tacky Academy Awards ceremony (still remember that? – it was back on March 27) the blending of live action with pre-taped material was managed by the company’s Media Performance System 95, which synchronised the source material and switched the cameras live on air, all the while manfully coping with the fact that it was being made to run under the final beta release of Windows95.
