AST Research Inc’s AST France aims to capture 5% of the local personal computer market as a result of its purchase of Tandy/Grid, the French company’s president Yves Borel told La Tribune-Defosses. The merger of AST France and Tandy/Grid should bring us this year to 494m francs in billings and over 40,000 personal computers in volume. The total market for MS-DOS and Windows machines in France is 1m today, he goes on: We hope to win 5% of the market quickly, he said. Following the acquisition, AST France gained 1.6 points in market share for a total of approximately 4%. In the market, Borel said the Grid name will be used for high-end notebooks, desktops and all new technologies for text recognition. However, in certain sectors where Grid and AST have been competitors, such as desktops computers in France, the Grid name will be replaced by AST, the newspaper noted.
