The generality of US banks that offer home banking for users of packages such as Intuit Inc’s Quicken, Microsoft Corp’s Money and Meca Software Inc’s home finance package, are hedging their bets by signing non-exclusive agreements for two or all three of the products: while Intuit announced 19 banks planning services based on Quicken, Microsoft has 17 backing Money for Windows95, and many of the same names turn up on both lists – Microsoft has Chase Manhattan Corp; Bank of Boston Corp; Centura Banks Inc; Chemical Banking Corp; CoreStates Financial Corp’s CoreStates Bank; M&T Bank; Compass Bancshares Inc’s Compass Bank; First Chicago Corp’s First National Bank of Chicago; Marquette Banks; Michigan National Corp’s Michigan National Bank; Texas Commerce Bank; First Interstate Bank; H F Ahmanson & Co’s Home Savings of America; Sanwa Bank California; US Bank; and Wells Fargo & Co’s eponymous bank.
Siemens AG says pending orders from Spanish cellular phone operator Airtel SA could be worth up to $215m, confirming that Airtel has named its Spanish unit, Siemens SA, as joint industrial supplier for 1996 and 1997 alongside L M Ericsson Telefon AB, but no orders have yet been placed with either as yet.
Silicon Graphics Inc expects sales to reach $3,000m in the financial year ending June 1996, senior vice-president for North Pacific and East Asia Teruyasu Sekimoto told Reuters in Singapore: for the year just ended, it reckons its Asian sales will be up 45% at some $330m.
Hewlett-Packard Co is not surprisingly seen as a deep and rewarding pool in which to fish for management talent, and Cray Research Inc has tapped Karl Freund, who was senior marketing executive in the workstation division to take the newly-created position of vice-president of marketing, where he will be responsible for directing Cray Research’s long-range marketing strategy, market identification and product requirements, competitive analysis and positioning, and strategic relationships with vendors and with industry organisations.
Tele Danmark A/S has opened a new Far East regional centre in Hong Kong, its first Asian office, saying it intends to participate to the full in one of the future’s key development areas, using Hong Kong as a springboard for activities in Singapore, Thailand and China and other Far East markets: it will share offices with Honeycomb, a consortium in which Tele Danmark has a one-third stake, which is bidding for a Personal Communications Services licence in Hong Kong.
Siemens AG is fighting price falls in key markets by redefining its businesses and boosting efficiency in the hope of expanding as Europe deregulates the telecommunications sector, the company told Reuters: changing technologies and increased competition are drastically pushing down prices for some of its key products, and has faced much tougher competition at home since the telecommunications equipment market was liberalised in 1989, and prices of both computers and communications equipment, the group’s two largest businesses in terms of sales – are falling about 10% a year, and prices of personal computers are dropping 15% to 20% a year; Falling prices are a huge problem for us and for the whole industry, said Michael Beckmann, deputy director of marketing for Siemens’ public communications networks group, which is responding by shifting its emphasis from hardware to services to keep up with the changes in its market, which presents new problems as custom ers in Europe and Asia are less willing to pay for software; Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG is putting renewed emphasis on personal computers, which are showing double-digit growth rates worldwide, said Klaus Hommer, vice-president of business strategy and marketing – it aims to quintuple personal computer sales to 3.1m units by the year 2000 from about 600,000 this year; personal computers already make up nearly 70% of its sales.
Philips Electronics NV is to start making cathode ray tubes in Russia following an investment in the country’s largest tube
maker, Joint Open Stock Company Velt: Philips has also invited the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development to take an equity stake in Velt with Philips and says the bank intends to hold the majority; the equity investment and expansion costs will initially come to around $50m; Velt has an annual production capacity of 1.8m tubes and employs 7,500 people, but Philips plans to increase capacity to more than 3m picture tubes by the end of 1999.
A renewed partnership between Digital Equipment Corp and Software AG will see the latter’s key software, Natural proprietary language and database management systems Adabas C and Adabas D, going up under Digital Unix on the Alpha systems. – o – Delta Air Lines is going to migrate its databases and applications out of the Sybase Inc environment and on to rival offerings from either Oracle Corp or Informix Software Inc, according to Computerworld.
Ornet Data Communication Technologies Ltd, Carmiel, Israel, has a $900,000 order for local network switching hubs from Showa Electric Wire & Cable Co Ltd of Japan, where the Israeli sees huge potential.
Accountants tend to start to cough and shuffle their feet and look the other way when client companies start talking about how they want to put values on their brands and add them to their balance sheets as assets – and you can understand why when you read in the Sunday Times that next month, US magazine Financial World will publish the latest annual survey of brand rankings, which uses what the paper calls a complex and controversial formula developed by Interbrand Ltd, in which, it seems that IBM Corp’s IBM brand has done the most miraculous Perils of Pauline with one bound he was free trick by plummeting from third in 1993 to a dismal 282 in 1994 and back to third in 1995, which would have caused some rather painful write-offs and write-backs in its balance sheet if it really did value the brand in its books; IBM is apparently worth $17,100m, the Motorola Inc brand is worth $15,300m, the Hewlett-Packard Co brand is fifth, worth $13,200m; IBM apparently achieved its miracle by an outstanding 1994 as a result of draconian cost-cutting coupled with a share rebound in mainframe profits… so what value should we put on the Computergram brand?
