Bull SA’s cutbacks will hit its joint venture with Hungarian company Videoton
Bull International SA manager Gerard Bloch-Morhange, says that although the French company, which recorded sales of $90m in Eastern Europe during 1989 – sales that are forecast to rise to $120m this year – is profitable at the moment, its East European operation will fall into the red in future. This will be due largely to its joint venture with the computing arm of Hungarian electronics conglomerate Videoton, (CI No 1,378) – to which Bull is committing up to $200m. The French company is looking to reduce drastically the size of this venture. Morhange says that up to 50% of the 2,000 or so employ-ees currently employed in the Videoton arm of the operation will have to be laid off. Videoton vice-president Csaba Barath said that while the company previously had a very comfortable market in the East European countries, the combination of the opening-up of borders, the collapse of the Comecon market, high manufacturing costs and obsolete products have completely reversed this picture. Barath is emphatic about the company’s moral obligation to its employees, and although redundancy is now theoretically an option for East European firms, the Western practice of slashing jobs in their thousands simply will not wash. The future for the 16,000-strong Videoton as a whole is increasingly uncertain Barath himself does not know what is going to happen. However, the Hungarian government is known to be considering the privatisation of the Videoton group, including its computer division.
Interactive Systems to launch System V.4 Unix, will move into applications
At last month’s East-West High-Tech Forum in Budapest, Interactive Systems’ Gary Williams revealed that its Unix V.4 operating system product will be announced early in 1991, with shipments to begin by the year-end. In an effort to boost its fortunes, Interactive – which competes head-on with the likes of Santa Cruz Operation for a share of the Unix market – is also to begin diversifying its business beyond its traditional operating system software base into applications. The first batch of applications will be imaging software derived from Interactive’s Eastman-Kodak parent, and will be launched next year.
Sun Microsytem’s Bill Joy takes the Sparcstation to Moscow
With two distributors in Poland, and one each in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Sun Microsystems Inc’s country manager for the Soviet Union and Poland, Mirek Wierzbowski, says the company has done $2m worth of business in the first three months of operations over there. Both Sun co-founder Bill Joy and Wierzbowski will be speaking at the Unix show in Moscow, where they hope to sign up Soviet distributors. Sun is now able to export its basic Sparc machines into the Eastern Europen countries – providing they contain none of the high-performance graphics add-on technology – and is keen to break into the Soviet market where Sun-3/60 clones are already reported to be in use. Moscow’s Unix show – the first Unix-only affair to be held in the Soviet Union – is expected to attract several hundred delegates, where Western and Soviet Unix companies will be exhibiting side-by-side.
Autodesk’s Moscow-based joint venture Parallel develops Lisp compiler
Richard Handyside, managing director of Autodesk UK Ltd, says that a new version of its AutoCAD software will be unveiled later this year, which will include a bundled Lisp compiler developed by engineers at its Moscow-based joint-venture company Parallel, which is headed-up by Spartak Chebataryof. Handyside said that after four years of operation Autodesk is now making a profit out of its Soviet venture, though it is still investing in its other East European concerns. Russian, Polish, and Czech language versions of AutoCAD are now available – a Hungarian edition will be available within the next few months. Handyside says the firm needs to sell around 500 copies to cover the cost of developing each local-language version.
Computerland making $1m sales a month in Moscow, expands to Hungary, Polan
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Retail computer franchisor ComputerLand Corp says it will be opening a new shop in Budapest, Hungary in January. It also has a further two stores which will be opened in Poland very shortly. Its Moscow operation – which is said to have a virtual monopoly on sales of IBM equipment in the USSR – is now reported to be cracking the $1m-a-month barrier.
Computer Aided Technology Ltd to open support centres throughout USSR
Value-added reseller, distributor and software developer Computer Aided Technology, CAT Ltd, the Moscow-based joint venture set up in June by US firm Merisel, the National Economic Society of the USSR and the Soviet Diplomatic Corp’s administration service – headed by Mikhail Krasnov – says its first service and support centre is now open for business in Moscow. A second will open in Leningrad soon, with others to follow in Kiev, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Krasnoyarsk and other cities.
Bulgarian Interprogramma seeks Western software distributors…
Sofia, Bulgaria-based Interprogramma – a joint Bulgarian-Soviet institute – is looking for Western distributors for its range of CAD/CAM, database, expert system, office automation, communications and software engineering software which runs on IBM, DEC and personal computer hardware: in addition the outfit, with 200 employees, is looking for Western equipment to distribute in Eastern Europe.
as Western distributors seek Eastern partners and software
Dell Computer Corp, Wordstar International Inc, Interactive Systems Corp, Cimlinc Inc and Prime Computer Inc are among a long rollcall of firms now actively seeking partners so that they may set up distribution operations across Eastern Europe. They are all also hunting Soviet and East European software to market in the West. – William Fellows
