BellSouth Corp’s Dataserv Ltd has confirmed that 17 people have been made redundant at its leasing operation based in Windsor (CI No 1,299). The company says that the layoffs are partly due to a downturn in the UK economy, and cited high interest rates as a significant factor in customers deferring capital expenditure. Vicky Glaysher, executive-vice president for hardware, says that this is compounded by the lack of major products announcements from IBM, which has created a stagnant market. Simon Finch, executive vice-president of finance, believes that the role of IBM and a healthy economy are crucial to the easing of trading conditions. He also believes that IBM will continue to concentrate on market dominance at the expense of profitablity until it has achieved what it considers to be an acceptable level of account control. However, he says that IBM cannot continue to hurt profits indefinitely, and the economy will experience a turn-up at some point. Consequently, Dataserv has no intention of leaving the IBM leasing market. BellSouth in Atlanta has emphasised that the UK operation is totally separate from the US company, and the latter has no plans to announce redundancies, although IBM announcements are as significant a market factor there as in Europe.
