IBM Corp’s International Procurement and Service Centre in Berlin has signed a contract to transfer process management expertise and slider technology to the Bulgarian hard disk drive manufacturer DZU – Stara Zagora manufacturing partner of Sunnyvale 3.5 disk drive company Kolak Corp – and is expected to re-commence sourcing components from the firm in the near future. DZU, by far the largest of the former-Comecon computer manufacturing firms, employed over 20,000 staff in the late 1980s at its plant in Stara Zagora and regularly turned over revenues in excess of $1,000m. However, the company was savaged by the disintegration of the Comecon trading block and by western competition. The company’s most up-to-date product is a 40Mb 5.25 drive, and employment has now fallen back to under 5,000 while revenues last year amounted to $30m. The firm is in the process of being privatised. John Fox, at the IBM Procurement base in Berlin, revealed that DZU did, nevertheless, supply IBM worldwide with high-precision disk drive castings for several months in 1992, before a mission change within IBM Havant. John Fox maintained that the castings matched the quality of those offered by Western suppliers and argued that the company’s involvement with Aura Associates was helping DZU to bridge the technology gap. DZU also has a contract in place to manufacture head-disk assemblies for the US 1.8i disk drive pigneer Aura Associates. The partnershap with IBM appears to be one of the most potentially significant so far developed by the Procurement and Service Centre, which was established in 1991 to facilitate the sourcing of components from Eastern Europe and former East Germany – both for IBM’s own purposes and for third party clients – by developing an active relationship with potential suppliers and providing them with training and consultancy and technology transfers. Most recently the Centre hosted a conference for the electronics industry in Poland in collaboration with the Polish government at which the urgent need for suppliers to obtain ISO9000 certification was stressed. Procurement Centre manager Dieter Massek said that the IBM division is on target to turn over $100m this year. As a result of the work of the Centre, IBM and its third party clients are currenly sourcing cables from Poland, printer parts from the Czech Republic, power cables from Slovakia, magneto-electronal assemblies from Slovenia, sheet metal from Hungary, and software from the Commonwealth of Independent States and Czech Republic.
