Despite all the cold water poured on talk that AT&T Corp might buy a stake in Mercury Communications Ltd, we hear that AT&T did reopen talks with Cable & Wireless Plc in February – for perhaps the fourth or fifth time since 1990: Keith Woolcock, telecommunications analyst at Smith New Court points out that the problem for AT&T is that if it wants a full international licence from the UK, Mercury is the only game in town, because the government has made it clear that it is not going to end the duopoly on international traffic any time soon; the UK is the third largest international route from the US after Canada and Mexico, and with international rates on the continent so much higher, routing all European traffic through London would be extremely attractive to AT&T if it could own its own facilities here; in general, it doesn’t like minority stakes in major businesses, and Cable & Wireless is nervous about its dominance, but competition within the UK is growing so fast that owning a presently under-used network that cost a fortune to build is looking less and less attractive, so that the company could even sell the network outright to AT&T and turn Mercury into a pure services company buying capacity wherever it is cheapest.
SCI Systems Inc seems to be chiding us for assuming that it has only one new contract manufacturing agreement worth over $100m, and hinting that it does have IBM Corp’s Power Personal business: the company now says that it has recently concluded an agreement with an American multinational company to produce a family of computer products and shipments have commenced – and NEC Corp clearly cannot be classified as a US multinational.
Compagnie des Machines Bull SA is merging its Bull CP8 Smart Card subsidiary with its transaction terminal operations to create CP8 Transac, an enlarged subsidiary that takes in the company’s point-of-sale terminal, automatic teller machine and its Smart Card businesses to create the largest company in the world dedicated to secure info-highway card transactions.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd says that it has no current plans to convert the proceeds from its $5,700m sale of 80% of MCA Inc into yen, and will instead use the money over the next four to five years for investment in multimedia and other new areas; these investments will be largely dollar-based.
The Hermes Europe Railtel joint venture that plans to build a pan-European telecommunications network along railway tracks says it will work with state telecommunications operators to get permission to start up in some countries from 1996: it hopes to beat the 1998 liberalisation deadline by seeking to operate under the licences of existing operators, because they will be customers for its network; Hermes Europe Railtel is a joint venture between the Hitrail consortium of 11 European railway companies, including British Rail, SNCF of France and the Deutsche Bundesbahn, and Global Telesystems Group Inc, a US phone service developer; Hermes will be an international-only operator, selling capacity on its cross-border fibre optic network to carriers to help them offer high-quality services; it will not offer services directly to end users nor will it offer capacity for in-country communications traffic.
CableTel South Wales Plc, 60%-owned by US-based International CableTel Inc, 40% by South Wales Electricity Plc, has bid for the 230,000-home cable telephone and television franchise in South Wales, and reckons it is the only bidder for the franchise, which covers Mid Glamorgan, South Glamorgan and Gwent; it already operates the franchise for 330,000 homes in the Cardiff area.
Oceanport, New Jersey-based Concurrent Computer Corp reports a major order from the UK Defence Research Agency for a 200MHz three-processor version of its Maxion multiprocessor: the Maxion will be interfaced to a high-performance real-time hardware-in-the-loop missile simulation facility at the Defence Research Agency to evaluate the performance of existing guided missiles and doing r
esearch and development work on future ones.
The pact for Rochester, New York-based Frontier Corp – the former Rochester Telephone Co – to acquire Detroit-based ALC Communications Corp involves Frontier paying some $1,800m in shares to create the fifth long-distance telephone company in the US: ALC holders get two Frontier shares for each ALC they own, leaving them with 49% of the enlarged company; the new Frontier would have combined revenues near $2,000m with $1,400m of that in long-distance; the fourth largest US long-distance carrier is currently LDDS Communications Inc, but that baton is regularly changing hands.
Don’t know how Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing possibly managed it, but you can’t think about climbing Mount Everest these days without a notebook computer, so Compaq Computer Corp is sponsoring the Americans on Everest 95 Expedition with LTE Elite notebook computers.
Know any software engineers proficient in all the latest techniques and dissatisfied with their current job? Computer Associates International Inc is finding it so hard to recruit such people – Cobol is out, SQL, C and C++ are in – that according to the Wall Street Journal, it is offering employees a bounty of $2,000 for each such person they round up and haul in once the candidate is taken on by the company.
Sage Group Plc’s Dallas-based accounting software publisher DacEasy Inc has formed a partnership with Artisoft Inc covering its network versions of DacEasy Accounting, Payroll, Point of Sale, Order Entry and Job Costing software for MS-DOS: as part of the LANtastic Developer Alliance Programme, each DacEasy application has been made completely compatible with Artisoft’s LANtastic 6.0 to provide a networked system for small firms; the network version of DacEasy Accounting for MS-DOS 5 supports an unlimited number of users at $300.
NEC Corp is to speed up construction of its new 64M-bit memory chip plant in Livingston, Scotland by a few months to cope with the strong yen: it plans to complete the plant as soon as possible to reduce the adverse impact of the high yen, but a radical change in the building schedule is impossible, it said; the plant was originally scheduled to start operating in October 1996.
Acorn Computer Group Plc said it achieved a 94.2% take-up of its one-for-three rights issue to raise รบ17.2m, mainly to fund its Online Media division: Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA’s stake in the company falls to 58.9% from the previous 78.5%.
Capita Group Plc current trading is comfortably ahead of the corresponding period in 1994, the company told the annual meeting yesterday.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB has won a trial order from Telia AB for the world’s first dual-mode Groupe Speciale Mobile and Digital European Cordless telephones: the order was for 5,000 of the new phones, but its value was left unspecified.
Why did Matsushita Electric Industrial Co decide to take a big hit on its MCA Inc acquisition? One analyst told Reuter the Japanese company’s relationship with MCA was so bad that it could only find out what was going on at the movie studio by reading about it in Variety.
