IBM has been holding court in Vienna, outlining its plans to make a takeover bid for the Eastern European computer markets. According to Computerwoche, the company is hopeful that it will have at minimum office representation in each of the former Comecon countries. The company’s Vienna-based service and marketing organisation, IBM Roece Inc – it stands for Regional Office Europe Central and East, which is responsible for Jugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania and Hungary, wants to pass on its competence, know-how, and some of its personnel to its East European outlets. The state of development in each of the Eastern European markets will be different, so the IBM offices will have to take account of local market conditions, Eugen Hahn, managing director of IBM Roece, told journalists in Vienna. It’s hard to say whether IBM Roece will manage to set up an actual company in each of the designated countries, but to suggest the feasibility of this ambition, Hahn points to the example of IBM Hungary, where around 100 people are employed by the company, which is more or less self-sufficient. Hahn expects the numbers of employees in each of these countries to climb dramatically over the next couple of years. So far, IBM has 500 employees in Jugoslavia, an office in Czechoslovakia and a branch in Poland. In the near future, Hahn wants to see more co-operation with local software companies that have developed market-specific applications. He is eager to point out, too, that Western companies moving into Hungary have been able to communicate with their mother companies in the West via IBM links since April this year and that, at the rate of development and liberalisation of exports, IBM could soon be in a position where it will be able to supply entire the range, from personal computers to mainframes now that rules about technology exports to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia have been relaxed. Despite the shortage of foreign exchange, IBM Roece is expecting exceptional growth rates. In 1989 IBM Roece exported services with an equivalent volume of $23.6m, down from $28.0m in 1988. IBM Austria achieved sales of almost $640m in 1989, on which it reported profits equivalent to $47.5m.
