Seems Amstrad Plc can’t do anything right as far as the City is concerned, and needless to say the imaginative decision to bankroll Micron Technology Inc has been ill-received: it’s all very well to argue that the memory chip shortage will go away (it will), but to succeed in its strategy, Amstrad needs those chips now, and whatever market share it can pick up as a result of being able to ship more 80386 machines than its competitors is an investment for the future – remember the Amstrad name is to be confined purely to the business products, and computers are by no means the only business products we can expect from Amstrad in the future – yet while Alan Sugar is intent on creating a British Xerox, the market persists in seeing his company as John Bloom’s Rolls Razor reincarnated; as for Micron, even if it does lose $40m or $50m in the next down cycle of the chip business, 9% of that is not going to knock a big dent in future Amstrad profits and with Sugar on its board, Micron might well start springing a few surprises itself.
