Shares in Securicor Group Plc fell 42p to 1,543 pence and its Security Services Plc affiliate 22p to 878 pence after the company announced that it had held talks with partner British Telecommunications Plc about British Telecom buying its combined 40% stake in Cellnet Mobile Communications Ltd, but that the Department of Trade & Industry had said it was unwilling to let British Telecom raise its stake in Cellnet to 100% from 60% at present; Securicor said it was considering all options, including sale of the 40% stake to a third party.
The Americans – and indeed most of the international community – are doomed to find that negotiating with the Chinese is like trying to grasp a handful of water, and the International Herald Tribune reports from Hong Kong that the Peking regime has allowed seven of the eight compact disk factories it closed for piracy violations after the US negotiators got heavy over intellectual property rights in February, to reopen; the plants do both software and music disks.
Sony Corp plans to launch the PlayStation computer games machine in Europe and the US in September, and for Europe it has set up a sales and distribution alliance with Japanese company Namco Ltd, the biggest operator of amusement arcades in the US: Namco has given Sony Computer Entertainment exclusive distribution rights to its entire catalogue of software throughout Europe in versions that will run on PlayStation; PlayStation sales in Japan, where they sell for around $475, are now over 1m, and the four Namco games currently available to play on the system exceeded 20% of total software sales in the market; it will launch in Europe with six Namco titles and a further 10 will be launched next year, Sony noted.
Separately, Japanese arcade, computer game and leisure company Namco Ltd told Reuters on Friday that it will be opening an arcade in the in a converted theatre in Great Windmill Street, just off London’s Piccadilly Circus, minutes from the Trocadero, which Burford Holdings Plc plans to turn into a Segaworld theme park in partnership with video games firm Sega Enterprises Ltd.
Quantum Corp is expanding Quantum Peripheral Products (Ireland) at the Dundalk plant, tripling the size of the technical support facility: Quantum says the expansion has been precipitated by rising demand for its hard drives.
Ascom Holding AG and L M Ericsson Telefon AB will not after all be forming a joint venture company in the field of public switching: instead, the existing agreement that allows Ascom to make Ericsson exchanges under licence will continue and the decision won’t affect other co-operation agreements between Ascom and Ericsson in the fields of transmission equipment and paging systems; Ascom also said after the annual meeting that it expects profits to improve in 1995 on sales at near the 1994 level.
Oracle Systems Corp has removed the confusion over its proper name by merging its holding company, Oracle Systems Corp, with its operating company, Oracle Corp, and named the restructured company Oracle Corp.
There were five consortia with bids in when the tender closed for the licence to build and operate Belgium’s second cellular network: Mobilis brings together BellSouth Corp and Gevaert NV with the Flemish and Walloon regional investment authorities; Vodafone Group Plc is teamed with utility holding company Tractebel SA in Coditel; BelCell, includes the Telecom Finland, the Norwegian state phone company, the Belgian post office and the state railways; the other bidders are France Telecom Mobiles International SA and Unisource Mobile BV; Salomon Brothers International Ltd is helping with evaluation of the bids, and must report by the end of July; the winning consortium is expected to be announced by year-end.
After a 16-month evaluation process, Electronic Data Systems Corp has won a 10-year contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars, its second biggest in the country, to provide data centre facilities management services to the UK’s Department of Soc
ial Security: up to 1,500 Social Security employees are to transfer to the General Motors Corp subsidiary in the autumn.
Sunnyvale, California-based fingerprint recognition systems specialist Identix Inc dismisses the patent infringement lawsuit filed against it by Digital Biometrics Inc as frivolous and without merit.
Banksys, the Belgian organisation that has membership of 65 banks, reports that its Proton Smart Card electronic purse venture has won a trial of its system and technology in New South Wales, Australia with a pilot project starting this year.
Deutsche Telekom AG’s new chairman, Ron Sommer, speaking in public for the first time since taking the helm at the state monopoly, promised Our goal must be to become the most customer-friendly company in Germany and in all of Europe – that’s what our jobs depend on, but he will have his work cut out, because the company is legendary in Germany for its indifference to its customers, as was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal last week: it says that primitive analogue exchanges can still be found all over the country, not just in the east, and Telekom plans to have a fully digitalised system only by 1997; it is overmanned in comparison with its rivals in part because it needs an army of people to inspect connections visually that digital technology can test and correct automatically; the company says it does $154,000 per worker compared with $347,000 for the Swiss national carrier; the latest figure for British Telecommunications Plc was $161,000 but it’s on target for $175,000 or better; a three-minute international call from Germany costs $3.82, compared with $2.55 in the US and long-distance calls within Germany cost nearly double the US rate, and corporate customers that want to lease Telekom lines pay seven times the US level.
Santa Monica, California-based desktop software specialist Quarterdeck Corp has teamed with several Internet service providers, including NetCom On-line Communications Inc, UUNET Technologies Inc and the Portal Information Network to provide its customers with Internet access to Quarterdeck products: the new Quarterdeck group of Internet-based software products is set for release later this month.
CellStar Corp, Dallas has persuaded Motorola Inc to invest $15m in it within the next 60 to 90 days in order to facilitate the continued expansion of its distribution business: the two have signed a letter of intent for Motorola to buy unregistered common shares of CellStar in a private transaction; the company notes that it has also just closed a new $125m credit facility.
Correction: Digital Equipment Corp points out that its new personal computer procurement and facilities management service is called PC Utility (CI No 2,664).
AT&T Corp hopes to make its contactless Smart Card technology the world standard for cashless wallets and electronic commerce: We are already negotiating with three companies in different parts of the world for technology licences, said John Bermingham, president of AT&T Smart Cards; the cards contain an 8-bit microcontroller with its own operating systems on board, and are written to and read inductively and the memory is designed to survive 100,000 write and erase cycles.
Sunnyvale, California-based California Microwave Inc has now completed acquisition of Microwave Networks Inc for up to 3.475m new shares worth some $110m: privately-held Microwave Networks makes microwave radios in Houston, mainly for the worldwide cellular market.
Fore Systems Inc, Warrendale, Pennsylvania has enhanced its network management software skills with acquisition of Applied Network Technology Inc for $26m cash and shares and about $9m in options.
Scientific-Atlanta Inc has a new version of its luggable satellite telephone terminal: the TerraStar-M Model 9826A connects users with the Inmarsat-M digital satellite communications service, is the size of a briefcase and weighs about 18 lbs: it sells for $13,000 and includes the transceiver
, removable antenna and cellular-style handset.
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp’s NTT Central Personal Communications Network Inc says it received 5,000 formal applications for its Personal Handy Phone System enhanced Telepoint service between May 10 and May 31; the service starts on July 1 and the company says the response is less than it expected.
California Micro Devices Corp, Milpitas has completed renegotiation of agreements with Hitachi Metals Ltd, made necessary by unexpectedly poor year-end figures: it will now issue 100,000 common shares to Hitachi Metals and pay the company $50,000 in cash; it also agreed to forgo a $100,000 receivable from Hitachi and committed to provide training, tooling and promotional materials to Hitachi at its own expense; Hitachi Metals will also be buying California Micro out of their Philippines-based joint ventre for $1.4m.
Guildford, Surrey-based DIP Systems Ltd, specialist in small form-factor personal computers, has reported a profit for 1994 of almost double the previous year and is moving from its current site to rural Aldbury, also in Surrey: profits rose to ú150,000 from ú75,000 and the company says it is on track to reach a turnover of ú5m this year; the company says that it will concentrate on the provision of PC Card products and peripherals.
