Cable & Wireless Plc shares were a lively market yesterday, up sixpence at 411 pence after the Sunday Express claimed that the UK government had given British Telecommunications Plc the green light for a bid; British Telecom declined to comment on what it said was speculation, but the Department of Trade & Industry rather put the kibosh on the story by saying it had not been approached by British Telecom to request permission to make a bid – This is the first we’ve heard of any approach – I’m not aware of anything at all, it told Reuters.
We think such a deal is less likely than the market believes, and any acquisition of Cable & Wireless Plc by British Telecommunications Plc would be a bit embarrassing in Germany, where each has a rival partner, either of which would look askance at being dumped by what it thought was a strategic British partner: one solution would be to allow all the European operations to go with Mercury Communications Ltd, which British Telecom would anyway be required to sell off; the key attraction is Cable’s strength in the Far East, where BT is weak.
Intel Corp yesterday announced the expected 133MHz version of the Pentium, the second part in its new 0.35 micron, 3.3V manufacturing process, and claims it delivers 155 SPECint92 and 116 SPECfp92, over twice the original 60MHz Pentium; Pentium revenues exceeded those of 80486 processors in the first quarter of 1995 and the company said it is on track for the volume run rate to cross over some time this year; the new part is $935 for 1,000-up.
IBM Corp and Motorola Inc are ready with faster versions of the PowerPC 604: they are expected to add 120MHz and 13MHz versions this week, but according to PC Week, Apple Computer Inc is expected to reduce the speed at which the faster chip to 132MHz in its forthcoming Power Mac 9500/132 so that it can can set the processor bus to 44MHz to reduce the complexity and cost of other components on the logic board; the 133MHz part is rated at 200 SPECint92 and 200 SPECfp92, way over the ratings for Intel Corp’s new 133MHz Pentium; the new PowerPCs have 3.6m transistors, measure 12.4mm by 15.8mm and will be made in a 0.5-micron process; they will have two 16Kb instruction caches and both Motorola and IBM will fabricate them, with volume production expected in the second half; no further versions of the PowerPC 601 are now expected.
The event that investors in Lexmark International Inc (mainly buyout funds) have been dreading has reportedly happened: according to Inforworld, Lexmark has lost IBM Corp’s keyboards business for 1996 to NMB Technologies Inc, Chatsworth, California subsidiary of Japanese bearings firm Minebea Co.
Microsoft Corp is looking to make more money out of services: it will now provide support for personal operating systems networking issues on a fee basis only and the service will no longer be available as a part of no-charge standard support; and the price of priority desktop support for personal operating system products goes up to $35 an incident from the current $25; the changes come into effect on July 1.
Electron House Plc, whose shares were suspended yesterday, plans to sell its electronics distribution operations in Australia and New Zealand to Avnet Inc for ú17.7m in cash, and then acquire three subsidiaries of Electrowatt AG known collectively as Eurodis to form a European electronic components distributor with annual sales of over ú300m which would retain the London listing; Eurodis is a group of companies either wholly-owned or controlled by Electrowatt, which will be issued with new ordinary shares as part of the payment and there will be a ú10m rights issue; Electrowatt will end up with 40%.
New machines are fairly imminent, so Apple Computer Inc has cut prices on two configurations of its PowerPC-based Power Macintosh desktop computers, and four configurations of its colour PowerBooks: the cuts range from 5% to 18%, with a Power Mac 6100/66 with MS-DOS board, CD-ROM, 16Mb and 500Mb disk is now $2,630; the 8100/11
0 falls to $5,800, the PowerBook 520c to $2,070, and the 540c to $4,450.
The knee-jerk protectionists in Brussels have faced up to the fact that memory chip prices are rising, and the European Commission has suspended for nine months the ridiculous anti-dumping duties, which are worked out on a totally spurious formula and are intended to protect fadeaway little companies like Siemens AG, Philips Electronics NV and IBM Corp, on dynamic random memory chips from Japan and South Korea; the 24.7% antidumping duty was imposed on the chip exports in 1993, after complaints by Motorola (UK) Ltd and Siemens AG.
Microsoft Corp is developing a plan to offer Smart Cards for use as electronic payment cards, the New York Times reported: I hope in a year or so we are testing something with a stored-value card, Warren Dent, director of business development for the company’s consumer systems division told the paper; the initial test may be with Microsoft’s own employees before the technology is offered more widely; it is working with chip manufacturers to develop the specifications of its card, and then expects to approach banks that would stand behind the payments on the card – executives of several of the major US banks say they have been heard from Microsoft, the Times noted.
Banyan Systems Inc, Westborough, Massachusetts has found it necessary to put out a release asserting that it has absolutely no affiliation with the public company doing business as Banyan Short Term Income Trust : the only surprise is that it appears to have taken until now for the issue to come up because there is a whole army of US investment and property companies with names that begin with Banyan.
IBM Corp has decided that 36% was perhaps a little too much to bite out of anybody’s salary, so after press comment and protests, the company is doing the gentlemanly thing and lowering the ceiling on pay cuts for its 120 top secretaries by all of six points, to 30%.
Novell Inc’s turnover in Asia rose 66% in the first half of its current fiscal year to October compared with the same period last fiscal, and half-on-half, they rose by 50%.
We haven’t heard of the company ever taking any action to defend it, but according to our sister paper Unigram.X, TechGnosis International Inc, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is still advising that the term ‘middleware’ is a registered trademark it was granted in 1992.
Incorrigible conspiracy theorists are convinced that Microsoft Corp only decided to announce that it would bundle the access software for the Microsoft Network with Windows95 when it realised that it had no chance of completing the operating system with all the features it had promised by the extended deadline it had set itself – and did it in the strong belief that the Federal authorities would launch an investigation, forcing it to hold the launch, but more to the point buying it precious extra development and testing time while leaving Uncle Sam to shoulder the blame.
Motorola Inc completed its purchase of a 10% stake in Compagnie des Machines Bull SA and noted that its conditional agreement to buy another 7% was dependent on the company’s performance in the first half.
Insider selling in [UK] computer-related companies over the past few weeks has been intense, reports the Financial Times, noting that three directors at Psion Plc have just sold a part of their holdings: they have no doubt been reading what we have been saying about the silly prices being paid for the shares in computer-related initial public offerings in the US after they start trading, and what is likely to happen to their share prices when Wall Street cracks and the London market dips in sympathy.
In a bid for long-term survival, troubled Toronto-based Unitel Communications Inc, Canada’s largest alternative long-distance company, has retained J P Morgan & Co in New York to seek investors and to review restructuring strategies; Rogers Communications Inc, which owns 29.5% of Unitel, said it is
a potential purchaser of the company; AT&T Corp, with 22.5%, may also be interested in increasing its stake.
The Richardson, Texas-based Spectravision Inc hotel pay-per-view movie company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to help it obtain additional financing and complete an operational turnaround while restructuring its finances, including its debt: the turnaround plan includes the restructuring of its customer service organisation and the ongoing rollout of its new Starpath video-on-demand system; the firm listed assets of $521.1m and liabilities of $521.7m; this is the second bankruptcy filing since it emerged from a September 1992 pre-pack aged bankruptcy filing.
Zinc Software Inc, Pleasant Grove, Utah, is offering version 4.1 of its Zinc application frameworks C++ library and development tool: Zinc enables developers to create cross-system applications with one set of source code; the Zinc engine is $500, clients range from $1,500 under Motif or NeXTstep, down to $500 under Windows and OS/2 Warp.
