First we’ve heard of it, and we are more than a little sceptical, but the guy that wrote the piece in this week’s Sunday Telegraph insists that it’s common knowledge on Wall Street: IBM Corp is trying to sell its mainframe, personal computer and software businesses, James Srodes wrote in Sunday’s edition.
Shares in Advanced Micro Devices Inc opened lower yesterday and continued to fall, shedding as much as $1.625 to $31.25 in early New York Stock Exchange trading after the company said it expects third quarter revenues and earnings to be lower than the prior quarter due to flat Am486 microprocessor unit shipments at sharply lower prices; the shares of Cyrix Corp and Intel Corp were also weaker in sympathy; Advanced Micro says that microprocessor revenue growth is unlikely to resume until the company begins shipping products with fifth-generation performance in 1996; it plans to produce a total of over 5m of the fifth generation superscalar devices during the first 12 months.
The UK Office of Telecommunications ordered British Telecommunications Plc to stop subsidising its telephone equipment supply unit after a complaint from Amstrad Plc: the telecommunications watchdog also plans to reopen its investigation into the high rates the company charges for telephone hand-set rentals; British Telecom plans to address the subsidy issue by raising prices on phones and facsimile machines it sells by as much as 20%.
Samsung Electronics Co has followed its siblings in rejecting Texas and plumping for Oregon for its new chip plant, according to the president of the Samsung Group’s Asia unit: it says it is still waiting for approval from the South Korean government, Min Jae-Hong told Dow Jones & Co, but he said the decision has been made to go to Oregon.
Apple Computer Inc has resumed shipments of the PowerBook 5300 series – that’s the one that threatened to cook your lap – and Apple USA will implement an immediate price cut to US dealers on the new PowerBook 5300 models because they are now using cheaper batteries; the street saving should be $100.
The London Stock Exchange is considering launching an order-driven trading system that would enable buyers and sellers of shares to enter orders directly from a personal computer, market sources told Reuter: it will launch in August.
What was missing from the announcement from Ken Olsen’s new Advanced Modular Solutions Inc of its combination PowerPC, iAPX-86 and VAX microprocessor servers (CI No 2,739) was the company’s concept to resolve what it sees as the anarchy created by the personal computer: its idea is that the servers should support only diskless personal computers running Windows or whatever so that the network adminstrator has closer control of the software.
Although sales of Microsoft Corp’s Windows95 are generally on track, some industry watchers believe retailers over-ordered the thing in the belief that sales would be even higher, Dow Jones & Co reports: Rick Sherlund, analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co, estimates that about 2.5m copies of Windows95 have been sold since August 24 but he believes resellers ordered 8m to 10m copies in advance, far more than needed so far and I think Microsoft will end up taking some of that inventory back, he declared.
Hitachi Ltd, doing some $76,000m a year, is expected to spend $6,200m on research and development this year: IBM Corp, doing some $64,000m, is spending only $2,700m.
Mitsubishi Electric Corp says it is committing itself fully to the video-on-demand system market to meet growing demand for multimedia systems using personal computers, and has adopted the software developed by Starlight Networks Inc: its Mediawave system is claimed to provide real-time moving pictures to 40 personal computers at a time.
Training company Informatics Holdings Ltd of Singapore has formed a 30%-owned joint venture, IAF Pte Ltd, with Asia Focus Pte Ltd, 70%, to develop its training business in the Chinese city of Wuhan; Informatics already has trainin
g centres in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Peking.
The European Community may clear the proposed Phoenix alliance between Sprint Corp, Deutsche Telekom AG and France Telecom despite its on-going worries that the Atlas venture between the two Europeans will harm competition, Competition Commissioner Karel Van Miert said.
SunSoft Inc has rolled its enterprise management and network products groups into a single unit under vice-president and general manager Terry Keeley, who has been at Sun Microsystems Inc since 1991.
Yes but it is not going to play too well in the US, which always likes to claim the moral high ground in such issues against such inveterate industrial spies as the French (or is it simply that its the French that always seem to get caught?) – Robert Kohler, executive vice-president and general manager of TRW Inc’s San Diego, California-based TRW Avionics & Surveillance Group believes the US government should consider using the Central Intelligence Agency to spy for corporate America – If we’re willing to do dirty tricks for the defence part of national security, then why aren’t we able to do dirty tricks for the economic part of national security? asked Kohler, who spent 19 years at the CIA working on science and technology projects.
Siemens AG acquired Israeli switched Ethernet specialist Ornet Data Communication Technologies Ltd and its US subsidiary O-Net; no terms.
The 17 colour monitors from IBM Corp that it warns have been incorrectly assembled and can give you a belt (CI No 2,756) are ASCII terminals with Sony Corp Trinitron tubes offered for attachment to IBM’s own and to alien personal computers; the firm says up to 140,000 monitors may be affected by the fault.
Cray Electronics Holdings Plc says it expects further first half restructuring costs from stock write-downs and redundancies, due to further restructuring of its Cray Communications unit: chairman Roger Holland, widely thought in the City to be seeing out his last weeks in the post, says progress in restoring satisfactory profitability at Cray has been slower than is acceptable, adding that Cray will rationalise its product lines in the UK and Denmark and speed transition to new development technologies.
The Open Software Foundation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts has named Hewlett-Packard Co’s Jim Bell president and chief executive, succeeding David Tory, but only on an interim basis – he is on a six-month sabbatical from his post as director, Open Systems Alliances.
But the breakup also amounts to a risky gamble and raises the question: could AT&T be shedding too much of what made it great? writes the Wall Street Journal, noting that while heavyweights in medicine, entertainment and banking are in hellbent pursuit of mergers and bigness, AT&T has decided that the opposite course is better suited to the global telecommunications wars – but hang on a minute, the new AT&T Corp will still be doing about $49,000m in annual business from long-distance, cellular service, credit cards and consulting, making it still the world’s largest phone company and considerably bigger than the AT&T of a decade ago – it did $33,000m and change in 1984 – and the manufacturing company will be by far the biggest free-standing telephony and data communications equipment company in the world, at $20,000m a year nearly twice the size of L M Ericsson Telefon AB, and only a little smaller than the most comparable firm, Motorola Inc; the manufacturing side is going because its biggest market used to be the Baby Bells, but they are increasingly unwilling to buy from AT&T now that it is turning itself into a direct competitor of theirs.
Xerox Corp says its deal with Motorola Inc on PowerPC-based single-board computers for use in a series of future Xerox digital products doesn’t mean the Sun Microsystems Inc relationship is over, Xerox said; it says it is readying a slew of new office systems for launch next month, all built around Sun’s microSparc I processors.
BTG I
nc, building Alpha RISC-based workstations in Vienna, Virginia says it plans to acquire Concept Automation Inc, a systems integrator and value-added reseller based in Sterling, Virginia on terms to be announced at a later date; BTG reported $156.0m in sales in its most recent fiscal year, and Concept estimates its revenues will be $84m for the year to December 31.
Dell Computer Corp chief financial officer Thomas Meredith told the Montgomery Securities Investment Conference in San Francisco that the company could grow faster if supplies weren’t so constrained but said we’re getting enough supply to meet our internal plans: he estimated that the personal computer market would grow close to 30% this year and added that the company’s sales of computers with Windows95 software were on target.
Versant Object Technology Corp has appointed former Sybase Inc vice-president, international marketing to the vice-president marketing position created when Dave Kellogg headed across the Atlantic to Business Objects SA; Oracle Corp regional sales director James Lochry is on board as vice-president, sales.
