Data General Corp is one of the first companies to do business with a newly formed joint venture in Siberia. The company has a contract worth in excess of UKP100,000 to ship 2,000 80286 personal computers to the region of Tomsk, where the joint venture, Roevin Toco, is based. An undisclosed small percentage of 80386 machines will also be shipped. The first shipment will be in August. Roevin Toco was set up last October by the business services group, Doctus Plc of Chester, and a consortium of local organisations. By the end of next year Roevin hope to have an assembly unit set up to put together the personal computers, rather than import them whole, but the assembly will only be from board level upwards. Doctus expects around 150,000 to be assembled in the first year. The boards will also be supplied by Data General which will test them outside the USSR. The deal, signed last week, could be worth more in coming years if an effective distribution network can be set up. The consortium has permission to obtain hard currency to pay for Western goods by cutting down trees, from which 48m cubic metres of timber worth UKP2.6m can be extracted. In January, Data General announced that NPO Parma was to market its Eclipse MVs in the Soviet Union in the manufacturing sector (CI No 1,334).