IBM Corp announced yesterday that it will withdraw its Ambra line of budget personal computers from the European market on March 31 and the Individual Computer Products International Ltd company that ran the Ambra business becomes dormant again. The move does not affect the operations of Ambra Computer Corp in the US where the models are totally different. IBM says that with price cuts on its core ValuePoint, PS/1 and ThinkPad machines, the Ambras were no longer competitive. IBM said Ambra operations in Europe were fairly small, consisting of around 64 people, of whom 60 were contractual employees and only four were IBM staff. The four IBMers will return to IBM and the contractual staff would be offered redundancy terms. Ambra is estimated to have taken about 1% of the low-end clone segment of the European market. IBM initially said that Ambra was a means of trying out new mass-marketing techniques cheaply, but it clearly cost the company money, and it will leave some unhappy customers and resellers.
