General Motors Corp’s Hughes Aircraft Co has invested $10m in International Mobile Machines Corp in exchange for 400,000 shares of a new class of convertible preferred stock, and the Philadelphia maker of digital radio communications equipment hopes that the investment will enable it to become profitable by 1991. It lost $21.4m last year on sales of just $4.3m selling its Ultraphone digital radio systems that are used to connect scattered rural homes to the terrestrial telephone network. But its white hope, and the venture that its eating up research and development cash and causing such big losses at the company, is the effort to design equipment for the digital cellular telephone system specified by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association last year. International Mobile Machines hopes that Hughes’ cash, and, more importantly, its manufacturing capacity and skills, will enable the tiny company to compete with AT&T Co, Motorola Inc and Northern Telecom Ltd in the digital cellular telephone systems and equipment stakes.
