Cap Gemini Sogeti SA has called a conference for 5pm tonight Greenwich Mean Time to reveal whether Saimler Benz AG will exercise its option to increase its stake in the company to 50%, reduce its stake, divest altogether or what; its Debis arm currently has a 34% stake in Sogeti SA, the holding company that has a majority stake in the listed Cap Gemini Sogeti.
Sprint Corp says its global alliance with France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom AG and the investment by the two in Sprint are expected to close by the end of this month.
IBM Corp says it was awarded 1,383 US patents in 1995, a new record for the third consecutive year, and 27% more patents than any other company received last year.
Shares of Motorola Inc rallied from the low set in after-hours trading on Tuesday as long-term investors used the selloff as a buying opportunity and pushed the price back up by $5.125 to $50.375.
Bell Cablemedia Plc has sold its Worcester franchise to Telewest Plc for ú9.8m as part of a rationalisation of its geographical franchise clusters: Worcester consists of 75,000 homes and 5,000 businesses.
Reuters America Inc has acquired Equis International, a developer of technical analysis software based in Salt Lake City, Utah for an undisclosed cash sum: Reuters said its investment in Equis is not material in the context of Reuters net assets; it said it will integrate the Equis product line with that of Reality Online Inc, a Reuters company that develops and operates Reuters Money Network US on-line personal investment service.
Dun & Bradstreet Corp came back at closing yesterday to say that it would be selling Dun & Bradstreet Software in eight months; no word on the current size of the business, or whether it is profitable.
Bethesda, Maryland-based Oracle Federal Systems received a $34m contract from the US Department of Veterans Affairs to automate claims processing at the Veterans Benefits Administration: Oracle said it will provide software and services to modernise the claims process with an image-enabled document management system; the contract includes Oracle software and services along with third-party hardware and software products for document capture, storage, retrieval, and processing.
Microsoft Corp said future releases of its Windows family of operating systems will support the IEEE 1394 Serial Bus Interface standard: the company also said it signed a letter of intent with Compaq Computer Corp to accelerate adoption of the IEEE 1394 high-speed serial interface as a standard, which includes defining an open-host controller interface specification; it also signed a letter of intent with Sony Corp’s Sony Electronics Inc to develop open-device driver interfaces, application programming interfaces and an open-host controller interface for IEEE 1394; 1394 interface supports real-time digital data transfer for audio and video capture, editing and playback, as well as for distributed multimedia applications such as desktop conferencing, Microsoft Corp said.
Nokia Telecommunications, part of Finnish Nokia Oy, won an order worth about $34.4m to deliver a Groupe Speciale Mobile network to Singapore’s Mobil One consortium.
Daewoo Electronics Co says it is planning to build a $100m electronics plant in Brazil: no details.
Boole & Babbage Inc, Sunnyvale has completed the acquisition of a storage automation facility software product from Real Solutions in Bay City, Michigan: Boole & Babbage said the product fully automates the monitoring of storage subsystems and automatically initiates threshold-driven storage management procedures based on conditions in the subsystems; terms were not disclosed, but Boole & Babbage said the purchase price was less than $500,000; the new product will be marketed and supported by its storage division as SG-Auto; pricing for SG-Auto will begin at $5,500.
San Jose, California-based contract manufacturer Flextronics International Ltd has agreed to buy Hong Kong based Astron Group Ltd, manufact
urer of miniature gold-finished printed circuit boards used in products such as cellular phones, pagers, optoelectronics and chip on board packaging: Astron’s 1995 turnover is expected to be around $25m; Astron shareholders will over time receive cash, notes and shares of Flextronics with an aggregate value of between $45m and $72m depending on future performance; Flextronics will take a substantial charge in the current quarter to write off the in-process research and development at the acquisition.
Bezeq Telecom said the Indian government had awarded Fascel Ltd, a company owned by a consortium in which it is a partner, a contract to set up a cellular telephone network in Gujarat state: the consortium consists of Bezeq, Thailand’s Shinawatra, and two Indian partners, HFCL and Kotak Mahindra; Bezeq said that the consortium’s total investment in the project is estimated at $108m; plans call for the installation of 350,000 cellular telephones in Gujarat; Bezeq said that the consortium has yet to receive confirmation regarding contracts for land line services; the Indian Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on the contracts which have been challenged by the opposition.
Libertel NV, the Netherlands’ second digital mobile phone operator, said it signed 27,000 subscribers in its first three months of business and claims this gave it 33% of new digital subscribers at the end of December: Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV, the Netherlands’ only mobile operator prior to Libertel’s September launch, said last month mobile phone connections more than doubled year-on-year to 500,000; digital accounted for some 240,000 of mobile connections, with analogue making up the remainding 260,000, PTT said; Libertel’s coverage is currently confined mainly to the western Randstad conurbation; second phase of network expansion, due for completion in mid-1996, will add other major Dutch cities and the southern province of Limburg, where Libertel is based; full national coverage is targeted for October 1998; Libertel, a joint venture of the ING NV financial group, which holds 52%, and Vodafone Group Plc, 35%, expects to go into operating profit by 1998.
Mitsubishi Electric Corp is to invest $11m to set up a semiconductor distribution centre and electronic manufacturing plant in Taiwan: the distribution centre will supply 16M-bit memory chips to Asia, Europe and the US from September in the northern county of Taoyuan; it will supply about 1.5m DRAMs a month; the electronic manufacturing plant will export its products to China, Europe, the US and countries in Southeast Asia; it is also due to begin operation in September; Mitsubishi has not specified production capacity or what equipment would be produced there.
Now that’s the kind of correction we like – apropos a release about Microsoft Corp choosing the Magellan Internet Directory from McKinley Group Inc for the Microsoft Network, we received this from Business Wire: In BW1067, which ran earlier today, the sixth paragraph should read ‘…with seamlessly integrated links’ instead of ‘with shamelessly integrated links.’
