The AT&T-Philips Telecommunications NV joint venture on public switching is optimistically increasing its investment in the UK, seeing big business particularly in subscriber loop carrier equipment and transmission kit for markets outside the UK. The company is even optimistically looking forward to further deals for its Number 5ESS switch if British Telecom’s business in network services takes off. The UK subsidiary is investing UKP17m this year to increase manufacturing space at its Malmesbury plant in Wiltshire for multiplexers and in particular for subscriber loop carrier equipment. The company is currently adapting the Slick SLC96 subscriber loop carrier kit, which AT&T has sold successfully in the US with 8m lines installed, as the Slick 120 for all markets outside the US, at its software development laboratory in the UK. It will begin manufacturing the product in the UK in the second half of 1988. Managing director of AT&T-Philips UK Brian Manley says he expects 50% of the business for Slick to go outside the UK by the early 1990s and he also expects that at least 50% of its UK business will come from this product in five years time as installation of fibre optics reaches a peak. The company has also met with some success in selling its European version of its Number 5ESS switch, called the 5ESS-PRX to acknowledge Philips’ contribution, to British Telecom for use as a centrex switch in a trial which begins in 1988 and it has supplied nine switches for Telecom’s Linkline 0800 and 0345 toll free service and another, which is currently being installed as an international gateway. Centrex is the system that provides subscribers with all the facilities of a PABX from a central exchange. AT&T-Philips UK will also invest in research and development to adapt the AT&T switches for European needs. It seems unlikely that Telecom will order many more of the AT&T switches even if it needs to increase capacity for Linkline and it will almost certainly not order any more 5ESS switches for centrex services because it has specified that centrex services should be available as an enhancement on its two supplied switches – System X from Plessey and GEC, and AXE-10 from Thorn- Ericsson. The company looks for a near doubling of its employee numbers to 600 by 1990 and it should reach turnover in the UK of UKP50m in 1987 compared with sales for the whole European of UKP224m in 1986; it is also looking to break even in 1988.

Venture Funding

Cirrus Logic Inc, designing and making chips – with the help of $1.5m of Sun Microsystems workstations – in Milpitas, California, has raised $11m in its latest round of venture funding, bringing the total raised to $3m. The cash, to expand manufacturing, came from new investors including the Allied-Signal Pension Fund and Berkeley International Capital Ltd, and existing investors including Institutional Venture Partners and Robertson Coleman & Stephens.