IBM France perceives the world computer market to be in a state of war, with Europe as the principal battleground, and it forecasts that only one European computer manufacturer – either Bull SA or Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG – will survive. This apocalyptic prospect was outlined by IBM France marketing director Philippe Guilhot de Lagarde at the celebration of two years of the AS/400 in Rome last week, the Agence France Presse news agency reports. De Lagarde presented the combined figures of 20 leading computer companies excluding Bull and Nixdorf – showing that aggregate profits fell 44.1% in 1989, and pointed out that if IBM was eliminated from the list, the slump increased to 54.9%. Adding in the losses from Bull and Nixdorf brought the profits of the world hardware industry down to zero for 1989, making the business a zero-sum game. On a continental basis he sees Europe representing the biggest computer market in the 1990s, ahead of the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Africa, and he sees this trend leading to a continentalising of the market, with the major players limited to IBM, either Bull or Siemens, and one Japanese manufacturer, which he suggested would probably be NEC.
