It’s clearly the silly season for takeover gossip and after the highly unlikely suggestion that Apple Computer Inc was about to shack up with IBM comes a whisper that some kind of combination might be on the cards between Matsushita Electric Industrial Co and Fujitsu Ltd: although again highly unlikely, especially as Matsushita still has to get to grips with its MCA Inc acquisition, it is not entirely silly because Fujitsu has always been the most exposed of the big Japanese electronic groups, being the only one that lives or dies by computers alone; concern has been expressed in Tokyo at the amount of additional debt Fujitsu was having to take on to pay for its ICL Plc acquisition, and Fujitsu and Matsushita are very much in the same camp – Panafacom is a small business computer brand name that combines the trade names of each; Matsushita – nearly twice the size of Fujitsu – intends to be a major player in computers but will find it an uphill struggle as it is starting almost from scratch – and its embryonic workstation and server business is compatible with that of Fujitsu, being based on the Sparc RISC chip.
