You need to follow the local papers closely when a company lives in an unfancied – in the high-tech sense – part of the world, and the Philadelphia Inquirer is still on the Commodore International Ltd case following sale of the assets to Escom AG, and hears that the German has changed its plans and now intends to start manufacturing Amiga computers in the Philadelphia area by August. Edward Goff, who works for Escom as a consultant, said he hoped to have Amiga 4000 towers available for distribution by the end of August. Escom had planned to make its Amigas in China or possibly Europe, but says it has not yet succeeded in working out a firm manufacturing agreement with a Chinese company, although a European company – likely Aquarius Robotron Systems GmbH – has agreed to do some Amiga assembly. The circuit boards will be stuffed by Zober Industries Inc, a contract manufacturer in Croydon, Pennsylvania, and the computers assembled by QuikPak Corp of Norristown. Petro Tyschtschenko, general manager of Escom’s newly formed Amiga Technologies GmbH subsidiary, told the paper that the Chinese would not be ready to begin manufacturing for at least a year, and that Escom wanted to produce 22,000 Amiga 4000s this year. The boards for all of them will be made in the Philadelphia area, with about 10,000 assembled locally for the North American market, The other 12,000 boards are expected to be shipped to Scotland, where the computers will be made by a contract manufacturer that used to assemble some machines for Commodore – likely SCI Systems Inc in Irvine. These 12,000 machines will be sold in Europe, he said. It also hopes to manufacture 100,000 to 120,000 of the smaller Amiga 1200s this year in Europe for the European market, he said. Escom has also formed a separate Commodore subsidiary that will begin making multi-media computers using the Pentium, to be sold in Europe under the Commodore label – Commodore did not mean much in the UK in the MS-DOS and Windows world, but it was the mainstay of its business on the continent. Consultant Goff added that Escom was looking for alliances with companies interested in licensing Amiga technology for other applications, such as television set-top boxes.
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