Cable & Wireless Plc says its US unit is now offering combined local and long distance telephone service for businesses in New York City: the Unilink service has 24-hour network management services, directory and operator assistance and access to emergency services; the company also has permission from Connecticut’s Department of Utility Control to offer local phone services in the state; the company says it also has requests outstanding in Illinois, California, and Texas.
Motorola Inc’s Messaging, Information & Media Sector has entered into a contract to buy two tracts of land totalling 130 acres in the Elgin suburb of Chicago: it intends to develop the property to accommodate future growth of this sector and the site will become headquarters for its management, as well as the home for the Multimedia Group, the Wireless Data Group and the International Networks Division.
And in the other half of the continent, Motorola Inc has chosen Sao Paulo state in Brazil as the site for a cellular hand-set factory due to start production in 1996, the state secretary for science, technology and economic development said: the factory will be built on a 9m square foot tract in the city of Jaguariuna, 75 miles north of Sao Paulo city; Motorola will also build a software development unit.
IBM Corp and Texas Instruments Inc confirmed South Korean reports that they have signed five-year orders for memory chips made by Samsung Electronics Co: the reports also named four other companies – Hewlett-Packard Co, Sun Microsystems Inc, Apple Computer Inc and Compaq Computer Corp, and pegged the total value of the unusual contracts – such deals are usually for no more than one year – at a cool $65,000m.
Winchester, Hampshire-based National Transcommunications Ltd has won a multi-million pound contract to supply programme distribution to cable headends throughout the UK, claiming it thereby breaks British Telecommunications Plc’s dominance of the market: under the five-year agreement with Associated Newspapers Plc’s Channel One, National Trans will make programming available digitally via the Orion 1 satellite to cable operators UK-wide, providing the fibre connection from the channel’s playout centre to its uplink facility, digital compression, uplinking and the space segment – and receiving equipment is also from National Transcommunications.
And the first prize is to win the right to buy 25% of Belgacom NV, the second prize is the right to buy 49.9% – British Telecommunications Plc pulled out of the bidding not long after it became clear that the foreign partner for the Belgian phone company would have to make a much bigger commitment than originally envisaged, and the prize is looking more and more like a poisoned chalice: one of the most costly and inefficient phone companies on a continent of costly and bloated phone companies, Belgacom is clearly over-manned yet chief executive John Goossens is saying that it will take all possible measures to assure employment for its 26,000 staff after the sale, and insisted that more savings could be squeezed from its fleet of 57,000 vehicles, its properties and by concentrating on productivity and taking back in work that’s been contracted out to third parties; shareholders of Ameritech Inc and Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV should urge their companies to withdraw their bids before it’s too late.
Broderbund Software Inc shares shot up 5.7% on Monday after it was disclosed that the co-founder of Microsoft Corp, Paul Allen, has paid nearly $60m to acquire 1.03m shares, or 5% of the Novato, California educational software company: Broderbund’s shares added $3.3125 to $61.3125; Allen says he bought in for investment purposes.
Great Neck, New York-based Avnet Inc completed the acquisition of a 70% interest in the Science & Technology division of Mercuries & Associates Ltd, a Taiwan-based electronic components distributor: Avnet said the unit, with operations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, has sales of about $51m in the fiscal year ended December 31, 1994; major franchise partners include Motorola Inc and AVX Inc, Avnet said.
Continuum Co Inc claims that its customer base includes approximately half of the world’s top 100 insurers and that its agreed takeover target Hogan Systems Inc supports a customer base of nearly 130 of the world’s largest banks, so that combined, Continuum and Hogan will have a customer base of about 750 financial institutions worldwide.
Lest anyone was in any doubt, Microsoft Corp has now declared that it has no plans to seek a 49% stake in NBC, although it is in talks with the television broadcaster.
Thorn EMI Plc’s Abbey Road Studios, which claims to be the best-known recording studio in the world (thanks to the Beatles, no doubt) has opened a new unit for creation of Enhanced CD compact disks that add video, graphics, animation, text and speech to the music – at the cost of cutting into the 79 minutes available on the disk for music: Abbey Road Interactive was developed by studio owners EMI Music, and is a Macintosh-based studio, and makes it possible for the music and the multimedia material to be produced on one site, with the four music studios linked to the Interactive facility by optical cables; EMI hopes to produce around 20 Enhanced CDs next year; the Rolling Stones and Peter Gabriel have already produced Enhanced CDs, but at dispersed locations.
Some 60% of Landis & Gyr AG’s business is generated from building controls, and if, as is likely, the bid from Elektrowatt AG succeeds, it says it will divest non-core activities, but it is not clear whether that includes pay telephones.
The New York Times has been giving a history lesson that makes painful reading for those sold on the Netscape Communications Corp-Spyglass Inc story: we’re only nearly as old as Methuselah, and we were otherwise occupied in 1969, another time when technology was seen as the short cut to everyone’s fortune, and the big names at the time were Telex Corp and Memorex Corp, which had taken the lead in disk drives and were judged to be about to eat IBM Corp’s lunch; the story was such a sweet one that Telex shares more than tripled to $142 from $44 in six months while Memorex went to $174 from $80 in four months; the upshot? IBM somehow survived, Telex eventually collapsed into the arms of Memorex, and the combination, now out of disks, filed bankruptcy papers not once but twice.
Wouldn’t you just know it – having escalated their rivalry from newspapers and books to television, Prince Charles and Princess Diana have now taken the next logical step and are setting up rival courts on the Internet: the full text of the Princess’s Panorama interview, replete with drippy stills from the interview (that lowered head, those uptilted eyes) is to be found at the UK Press Association’s Web site, and now according to Reuter Prince Charles was due to make his debut on the Internet yesterday with a speech to mark the fifth anniversary of his Business Leaders Forum which brings top executives together from around the world – It is a way of getting the same message across to schoolchildren gathered round the computer in an Indian village and to a boardroom in New York, the Forum declares.
