The most obvious buyer for the 40% stake in Cellnet Mobile Communications Ltd that Securicor Group Plc would like to sell is one of British Telecommunications Plc’s international partners: MCI Communications Corp and Telecom’s Spanish, Scandinavianm and Italian partners are not very likely to be interested, but energy conglomerate Viag AG in Germany might very well be.
Data communications does not look quite such a hot sector as it was last year, and Westborough, Massachusetts-based Banyan Systems Inc warns that it expects its second quarter net earnings to be significantly below 1994’s levels, when it did about $4m or $0.22 a share, on sales similar to the $37.1m it saw in the second quarter of 1994; it blames lengthening sales cycles, products that have been announced but not yet delivered and continued investment in international growth.
It mercifully seems to be getting a little harder to get meritricious class actions past judges, and Santa Clara, California-based S3 Inc reports that a US Federal Court judge in San Francisco dismissed a class action lawsuit filed in October 1994 following a fall in the S3 share price: in the end the dismissal was sought by the plaintiffs.
Farmington Hills, Michigan-based Compuware Corp has also seen off a shareholder lawsuit when a Michigan judge dismissed the action with prejudice and denied the plaintiff’s request to amend the complaint; another similar lawsuit had been withdrawn earlier this year.
Not all such suits are completely meretricious and Southborough, Massachsusetts-based Chipcom Corp may have a case to answer in suits pending against it over its sudden warning that poor business from IBM Corp would hit its figures: according to the Wall Street Journal, although it warned on April 20 that second-quarter sales might be as much as 20% down because of the IBM problem, it was only a month later that it elaborated and said the problems would extend through the third and fourth quarter because IBM was stuffed with unsold inventory; the shares fell 6.6% on the first warning but slumped 33% on the second, and in the interim, Chipcom insiders reportedly sold some 38,000 shares they received under the company’s option schemes.
Landmark Graphics Corp completed its acquisition of GeoGraphix Inc in a share exchange worth $15.4m.
Santa Clara, California-based Microtec Research Inc, which develops the VRTX Virtual Real-Time Executive embedded operating environment and now takes in what used to be Ready Systems Inc, warns that it expects to be only moderately profitable in its first quarter ended June 30 on net sales between $10.8m and $11.4m: the lower-than-expected revenue is due to a shift in the embedded systems market toward the PowerPC microprocessor – Microtec does not yet have a version of VRTX for PowerPC but it is working on it and expects to launch by year-end.
No-one seems to have spotted the fact, but, better late than never, SBC CableComms Plc was not one of the three cable companies involved in that video-on-demand joint venture announced the week before last (CI No 2,675), so its proposed combination with TeleWest Communications Plc to create TeleWest Plc (CI No 2,681) significantly expands the joint venture and leaves only the operations of International CableTel Plc, Comcast Corp and Groupe Videotron Ltee and General Cable Plc of the majors remaining sidelined, and Videotron has been playing with its own demand video test.
Desperate to present the impression that the system is a runaway success, IBM Corp is going up in 500s in announcing sales for its Ramac disk array: the company says it has now shipped 4,500 of the things, and claims the introduction eight months ago was the most successful ever for mainframe disk storage.
GO Communications Corp, planning to build a US-wide Personal Communications Services network, is to take Alltel Corp and Japanese trader Nissho Iwai Corp on board as investors: capital from the equity investments will be used to obtain licences during the
C block auctions for entrepreneurs set to begin on August 2, as well as to build and operate its planned networks; Alltel is to invest $40m for a 20% stake; no word on Nissho’s plans.
Compagnie des Machines Bull SA management is expected to present a new staffing plan for 1995 to the central worker-management committee this morning after its previous one was annulled by a court in Versailles, says Les Echos: the unions will be informed at the meeting of the measures expected to limit forced lay-offs – things like assisted voluntary redundancy, early retirement and flexible working options.
An explosion Thursday morning at a Hewlett-Packard Co facility in San Jose caused cuts, bruises and first- and second-degree burns to one woman when a glove box used to handle chips in an inert atmosphere exploded; 500 employees had to be evacuated; the injured woman was manipulating wafers used in manufacture of light-emitting diodes.
For the record, the UK Cable Communications Association ranks the UK cable players – by the number of homes in their franchise areas as the proposed TeleWest Plc, 3.8m; Nynex CableComms Plc, 2.5m, Bell CableMedia Plc, 2.0m, International CableTel Plc, 1.2m; General Cable Plc, 739,000, Comcast Corp, 724,000, Groupe Videotron Ltee, 693,000; Telecential Plc, 613,000, Singapore Telecom Ltd, 573,000, and Diamond Cable Plc, 501,000; the next biggest are Eurobell Plc, with 261,000 and IVS Plc with 211,000; Caledonian Media Plc, British Telecommunications Plc (with Westminster Cable), SaskTel Plc, English Cable Enterprises Ltd and Fundy Cable Plc each have franchises passing fewer than 200,000 homes; figures are for January this year, but won’t change much except as a result of mergers, because there are few franchises still on offer.
Acer America Corp looks for its big efforts at building its brand name to result in $1,000m of US sales this year, up from $858m last year.
AT&T Global Information Solutions says it has already begun its internal migration to Windows95 to provide a large-scale enterprise-oriented test site for Microsoft Corp’s new operating system: it has already upgraded more than 600 users to the pre-release version of Windows95 throughout its headquarters and at some other locations.
Acorn Computer Group Plc denies that it has any plans to market Macintosh clones (CI No 2,679), but with Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA as the controlling shareholder, Acorn proposes, Olivetti disposes: one interesting possibility would be for Acorn to confine itself to Mac OS plug-in boards for the Archimedes.
Qualcomm Inc shares were dancing last week on news that PCS PrimeCo LP has decided to use its Code Division Multiple Access digital cellular technology throughout its planned Personal Communications Services network: the PCS PrimeCo network will cover 11 major US markets and the limited partnership is jointly owned by AirTouch Communications Inc, Bell Atlantic Corp, Nynex Corp and US West Inc, and it says it chose Qualcomm’s code division technology because it will enable PrimeCo to offer wireless services in its own major markets, cost-effectively, and will give its customers a seamless link between Personal Communications Services and cellular telephone services.
The PCS PrimeCo LP deal is a big boost for Qualcomm Inc, but some analysts told Reuter that potential remains for a rival standard called Broadband Code Division Multiple Access under development by a joint venture between Siemens AG and Interdigital Communications Corp, which is also able to carry video and high speed data communications.
The European Commission has sent out requests for information on two satellite mobile phone systems, Globalstar, led by Loral Corp with Qualcomm Inc, and Iridium Inc: the Commission says that systems need to be assessed under European Union competition rules; it is already looking into the Inmarsat-P system.
Philips Electronics NV has released the specification for its new enhanced music Compact Disk, CD Plus, developed
with Sony Corp: CD Plus is a development of the CD-ROM aimed at the personal computer market, so that the disks can be played on an ordinary audio player, but when loaded into a computer, the fan gets video clips, lyrics, photographs and text along with music; Apple Computer Inc and Microsoft Corp support the new format, and a number of record companies are preparing releases for the market.
MountainGate Inc, a Lockheed Martin Inc company based in Reno, Nevada, and a provider of removable storage, has acquired Metrum Peripheral Products from Metrum Inc of Littleton, Colorado; terms of the deal were not disclosed, but MountainGate gets a line of archival storage products including Digital Linear Tape storage libraries, an optical disk library, VHS tape storage libraries, and a newly-announced line of high performance 128-track longitudinal tape libraries.
