Apple Computer Inc’s UK subsidiary bought out the 50% share of Cambridge-based Xemplar Education Ltd from its one-time partner Acorn Computers Ltd earlier this week (CI No 3,573), giving it full ownership of the company for $3m. Xemplar was formed as a joint venture between Apple and Acorn in April 1996, when Acorn handed over all of its then lucrative schools business to the venture. At the time, Acorn had an inroad to English schools – that was denied Apple – through official government recognition of its home-grown ARM RISC-based Archimedes computer line as a machine suitable for schools use. As part of the deal, Acorn agreed that Xemplar would also sell MacOS based machines to its schools customers. Apple now uses Xemplar as its sole partner for sales of Apple services and products into the primary and secondary school sectors, although higher and further education business go through Apple resellers and an in-house support team. Xemplar still sells Acorn proprietary RiscPCs and A7000s into the school market, but admits that this business is likely to shift towards Acorn’s thin-client network computers in the future. It says it welcomed Acorn’s recent decision to end development work on its next-generation Risc PC 2 (CI No 3,499), saying it had always recognized that the PC 2 was not an appropriate product for the school market. Recently, Xemplar also began selling Microsoft Windows-based PCs to schools as the PC Toolbox, based on hardware from Fujitsu Ltd, which it says it will aim at Acorn customers wishing to use an Intel platform. Xemplar made 30m pounds in revenues during 1998 with a dramatic increase in profits. It says it’s seen consistent growth over the last few years, but doesn’t appear yet to have reached its full potential. Three years ago, Xemplar had predicted it would soon be showing revenues of 90m pounds annually (CI No 2,851).
