Apple Computer Europe president Marco Landi said the subsidiary expects net revenue growth of about 20% in fiscal 1995 to September, which would put it ahead of the 17% market growth projected for hardware products in Western Europe; Apple Europe’s net revenues and unit shipments both grew 20% in the last six months, and the company will soon announce a partnership with a French water company on an interactive television project, but declined to name the company, although it is likely to be Compagnie Generale des Eaux SA and to be for television set-top boxes; it will also license Mac OS to a European company before the end of the year, and that is likely to be Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA; Landi says his optimistic forecast is based partly on Europe’s economic recovery, partly on the fact that the market is much less saturated than the US.
Cable & Wireless Plc’s Mercury Communications Ltd is to close its customer relations site in Birmingham at which 230 staff are currently employed: all the employees involved will be offered new jobs either at its customer relations centre in Manchester or elsewhere in Mercury; the company said last year that it would be shedding some 2,500 jobs in its restructuring.
Tadpole Technology Plc still knows of no reason why its shares should suddenly be friendless, but they lost another sixpence yesterday at 181p after a Tuesday fall of 19p.
San Antonio, Texas-based Datapoint Corp says its plan to spin off its auto dealership systems business into a separate entity has advanced to the point of preparations for due diligence review with three interested parties: the interest ranges from outright purchase of the new entity to a joint venture in which Datapoint would keep a stake.
Walldorf-based SAP AG says that the next release of its R/3 client-server business suite will ship in the second half of this year: written for Unix, it is now up on about 200 systems running Windows NT; despite the success of R/3, SAP intends to continue to upgrade the mainframe R/2 into the next century, and the next version will be released in the fourth quarter and will also run on IBM Corp’s parallel mainframes and support 24-hour service.
Novato, California-based Broderbund Software Inc has acquired Banner Blue Software Inc, a publisher of genealogy software; no terms given.
Hitachi Ltd’s variant on BiCMOS technology, which it calls ACE for Advanced CMOS-ECL and uses in its new top-end mainframe, differs from conventional BiCMOS in that instead of laying down an ECL core at the heart of the chip and surrounding it with CMOS, clusters of ECL circuitry are dotted throughout the chip area, which means that there is no single hot spot at the centre and Hitachi claims that the technique enables the ECL clusters to be made denser and therefore faster, and the since only non-time-critical functions are implemented in CMOS, the whole chip delivers higher performance than would the nearest equivalent pure ECL part.
US electronics components supplier Ogden Corp – no, it’s based in New York, not in Ogden, Utah plans to invest $1.5m in Ireland and create over 350 jobs: it will use Logitech SA facilities in Cork to do electronic contract manufacturing for the European electronics industry.
AT&T Corp says that its Interchange Online service is still set to make its commercial debut in the second quarter, with June now looking the most likely month: the on-line service will provide the tools for publishers to build electronic newspapers, and it now has 25,000 users helping its beta testing.
Commenting on its first quarter figures (page seven) L M Ericsson Telefon AB, chief executive Lars Ramqvist said he forecast that the pre-tax profit will continue to develop positively for the rest of 1995, even if not at the same percentage rise than booked in the first quarter, when it rose 48%; the most successful sector was mobile telephony – in total, turnover for mobile telephone systems and telephones rose 50%, he declared; Ericsson sees the gl
obal market for cellular telephones growing sevenfold in the next five years, with strongest growth coming in Asia.
Hitachi Data Systems Ltd tells us that it still hasn’t been handed down any action plan for the PowerPC by its parent Hitachi Ltd.
The Panasonic Personal Computer Co unit of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd says it will make significant price cuts of up to $1,100 on its high-end multimedia notebook computers with integrated CD-ROM drives: in the US, the V41 line now starts at $3,200, with the top-end model now costing $7,400.
Minnesota Mining & Maufacturing Co’s Post-it notes were a brilliant conception, even if they were developed by accident after one of its researchers used a 3M gum that did not stick very well to mark the hymns for Sunday in his hymnal, but the St Paul, Minnesota-based company can’t resist the temptation to complicate something brilliantly simple: it is developing electronic Post-it notes that will put up the familiar yellow notepad on screen; it can be attached to documents and printed, the annual meeting heard.
Maxtor Corp’s manufacturing capacity agreement with its 40% shareholder Hyundai Electronics Industries Co Ltd is now in place: Hyundai will manufacture Maxtor-designed disk drives at a 100,000 square foot plant in South Korea that could end up employing some 1,200 people; it will supplement the Maxtor assembly plant in Singapore; Hyundai will ship 500,000 drives to Maxtor this year and 4m next year.
Atari Corp chief executive Sam Tramiel said the company would report a loss for the first quarter because sales of the company’s 64-bit Jaguar Interactive Multimedia system were lower than expected in the first quarter because of a price transition – it cut the price to $160 from $250 in March.
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania-based InterDigital Communications Corp will receive a royalty advance of more than $20m in its licensing to NEC Corp the rights to manufacture and market cellular subscriber units and infrastructure equipment.
Sun Microsystems Inc plans to open an office in Israel within the next few months, said vice-president for intercontinental operations Timothy Dwyer, who also said in Tel Aviv that Sun was very interested in software applications being developed in Israel, especially in relation to systems integration – according to Reuter, a group of Sun officials has just returned from a visit to Israel to scout out opportunities with Israeli software firms and will study several possibilities over the next six months; chairman Scott McNealy also announced that the company will establish a Sun Software Information & Technology Exchange centre at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem – the Sun SITE system comprises a series of Internet servers located at major universities aro und the world where users can access data free.
Intel Corp’s chart shows the P6 at 0.6 microns initially, going to 0.35 microns and then 0.25 microns, the Pentium in 0.6 and 0.35 processes – happening already – and the 80486 stopping at 0.6 design rules.
Apple Computer Inc has unveiled HyperCard 2.3, offering a version accelerated for Power Macintosh or the same version optimised for 68000-based Macs: the new version includes new features such as Button Tasks, which enables users with little or no scripting experience to integrate all elements of a HyperCard stack; it also includes text-to-speech capabilities that support Apple PlainTalk software.
Microsoft Corp is developing a Chinese language version of Windows NT system for launch in early 1996, the company told Reuters in Peking, adding that it hopes Chinese Windows95 will be launched by the end of 1995 and will do some 1m to 2m copies in its first year of sales.
AirTouch Communications Inc has decided not to exercise its option to invest in Russian cellular company FGI Wireless: Our arrangement with FGI Wireless was designed to allow us to study the Russian market before making a significant investment, said an AirTouch senior vice
-president – after careful consideration, we have decided not to pursue the Russian wireless market at this time, he declared.
Norwalk, Connecticut-based Micro Warehouse Inc has acquired Technomatic Ltd, a catalogue retailer of personal computer hardware, software and accessories based in Kingsbury, here in the UK, with sales of about $45m in 1994; terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cary, North Carolina-based SAS Institute Inc has opened a subsidiary in Johannesburg called SAS Institute (Pty) Ltd, and a regional office in Cape Town, connected via satellite to the Cary headquarters.
