Underlining what we have been saying about the froth in the US new issues market, shares in Nexgen Inc, which were sold at $15 in its initial public offering soared to $29 in first day trading – and this for a company that while an exciting innovator, has swallowed enormous sums in venture capital and has yet to turn a profit – and had a mere $855,000 in sales by the end of last year; the company is backed by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, ASCII Corp, Compaq Computer Corp and Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, which should be seeing a handsome paper profit on their investments in chip designer.
Novell Inc’s second quarter figures failed to impress, and the shares slipped 62.5 cents to $22 in pre-open trading: without the extraordinaries last time, the profits were up about 45% at $95.9m on sales up 17% at $529.5m, in line with Wall Street analysts’ forecasts; chief executive Robert Frankenberg said sales of the company’s networking products were also up 17%, and that the sales transition to the new generation of NetWare, was going smoothly; sales of Wordperfect and other applications also grew strongly, the company added.
Cray Electronics Plc, which shocked the market with a thunderous profits warning, says finance director Jeff Harrison has told the board he plans to retire within six months.
Storage Technology Corp says it plans to launch 90 new products this year, up from 30 last year; it also named industry veterans William Hoover, boss of Computer Sciences Corp, and Thomas Vanderslice, who has been everywhere and seen it all, and is currently chief executive of M/A-Com Inc to its board.
Shares in Gestetner Holdings Plc plunged 37 pence to 66 pence in early trading yesterday after it said its Canadian unit could see heavy losses and it would take a ú15m charge for restructuring: Gestetner said it had problems integrating new information systems installed at its Canadian unit in the first quarter, and this had led to a slump in Canadian sales volumes of around 20%; if that continued for the rest of the year, the unit could lose some ú13m for the year.
San Diego-based Excalibur Technologies Corp reports that it has licensed Electronic Data Systems Corp’s sales force to integrate and distribute its document imaging and text retrieval software products.
NEC Corp says that by the end of March 1996, all its computers sold in the US will also be made there to get round the high yen problem; NEC sold 310,000 desktop and notebook computers in the North American market in the year to March and says that it already makes 220,000 machines, mostly desk-tops, at its Boxboro, Massachusetts factory.
Cable & Wireless Plc shares fell fivepence at 422p on the figures.
Singapore Telecommunications Ltd intends to rationalise its overseas investment portfolio in coming years, chairman Koh Boon Hwee told a briefing on the annual results: according to Reuter, he said the company would concentrate in areas where it has a competitive advantage, which will increasingly be in Asia where the growing momentum of deregulation in the telecommunications industry will provide many opportunities; Singapore Telecom International just announced participation in a paging joint venture in China, has submitted bids for projects in Hong Kong and Indonesia and is looking for investment opportunities in India, but Europe currently accounts for the largest part of its overseas investment of $360m or so.
US West Inc has acquired a 28.6% stake in the largest Czech cable television enterprise, Kabel Plus as, paying some $18.8m to become the second largest shareholder; the company has about 400,000 cable television connections throughout the country, and has begun broadcasting by satellite in Czech, and is interested in offering telephony as well as television, an unusually bright opportunity since it has cabled rural areas where there is very thin telephone infrastructure.
Wayne, Pennsylvania-based Comcast Corp says its Comcast International Holdings Inc unit is joini
ng the bidding for the cellular franchise up for grabs in Ireland: it will have at least 65% of a consortium that will include Radio Telefis Eireann, Bord Na Mona, an energy, horticultural and environmental products group; and GCI Ltd, a communications company that was formed by Irish entrepreneur Declan Ganley.
Arch Communications Group Inc, Westborough, Massachusetts has bought Data Transmission Inc, a privately held paging business with operations in Georgia, for $8.6m, to take its base to over 750,000.
It is a terrible indictment of today’s desktop operating systems that such a thing as an uninstaller is needed to clear up all the clutter – debris of dead programs – they leave all over your disk, but it means business for somebody, and SofTouch Systems Inc, Oklahoma City is offering UniMaint version 4, which it claims is the first uninstaller for OS/2: it still sounds like very hard work, but is designed to alleviate the problem that OS/2 becomes progressively more corrupted with time as applications are installed, deleted, and store unused data in the INI files and Extended Attributes; the Uninstall feature of UniMaint is designed to remove all application components from the users system, including executable files, application directories, Dynamic Link Libraries, OS/2 User INI file entries and associated help and information files, and will deregister any classes created by the application; UniMaint 4.0 is available next month at an introductory price of $90.
PictureTel Corp, Danvers, Massachusetts has unbundled the data-sharing software from its desktop videoconferencing system and is selling it as a separate product: called LiveShare Plus, it enables remote users to share all types of computer data on-line in real time; it needs an 80386 personal computer, can be used on a local or wide area network and is compatible with data conferencing products Microsoft Corp will introduce in 1996 under its joint development agreement with PictureTel; it is $250.
Parsippany, New Jersey industrial and defence computer systems specialist Diagnostic/Retrieval Systems Inc is to acquire NAI Technologies Inc in a share exchange valued at some $25.7m; it says NAI will add a significant component to its core military display workstation, data storage and systems integration businesses and the deal will create a $150m-a-year broadly-based organisation serving mi litary, government, commercial and international markets; Woodbury, New York-based NAI is a diversified international electronics company doing advanced computer system design and telecommunications work.
Nissan Motor Co will next month start testing a device to alert drivers that start to fall asleep at the wheel, but does not see it being marketed until the end of the century: it uses a camera linked to a computer to analyse eye movements and the frequency of blinking so that a pause or drop in the frequency of the driver’s blinking triggers an alarm – but they’d have to come up with something more insistent than an alarm for people like us, who relentlessly sleep out the ringing of four alarm clocks…
