In one of the most bizarre developments since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a Bulgarian company is helping to bail out an American company that is trading under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In the Comecon division of labour, Bulgaria was always charged with making disk drives for the entire Eastern Bloc, and the shrunken survivor of that exercise is DZU-AD of Stara Zagora, Bulgaria. As reported, DZU is assembling low-profile removable 3.5 disk drives for Sunnyvale, California company Kalok Corp. Now Kalok reports that DZU has promised it an additional $1.5m, bringing to $2m the total committed by DZU since Kalok filed for bankruptcy court protection in June. The agreement also sees DZU signing to build Kalok’s K-STOR series of drives in Stara Zagora, and to buy up to $1.5m of Kalok piece-part inventory, thus providing Kalok with further cash resources, and has guaranteed the company a $3.9m credit facility for purchase of fully assembled drives. Kalok says the new commitment from DZU, coupled with the $1.2m already invested by Teac Corp, Tokyo provides it with the financial base for completing a plan of reorganisation, and it hopes to win its discharge by year-end. K-STOR kits, including a removable 250Mb or 360Mb half inch high drive, a docking module and carrying case, are now exclusively made by DZU and Teac for distribution throughout the world. Kalok also offers its K-RAID line of fault-tolerant disk array subsystems, featuring the K-STOR drives.
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