Amdahl Corp accompanied news of a whopping $276m third quarter loss after restructuring charges (figures, page seven) with news that it is cutting another 1,800 jobs as it battles to steady the ship in face of the unprecedented upheavals in the mainframe market. It says it will seek more alliances like the ones with Sun Microsystems Inc on Unix servers and Electronic Data Systems Corp on its Huron applications development environment, and plans to vacate another 500,000 or more square feet of manufacturing and office space, which sounds like bad news for the plant just outside Dublin. It has created independent profit centres that will individually manage five lines of business IBM-compatible mainframe computers, data storage subsystems, Unix servers and software for the open systems market, applications development and production software, and educational and consulting services. It is also working strenuously to cut inventories, which have declined since the beginning of the year and helped to generate positive cash flow of nearly $120m so far this year; it is also passing the 1.25 cent a share quarterly dividend this time around. It warns that uncertain demand and volatile pricing make it difficult to forecast future operating results.
