The Chessington Computer Centre is to be sold off as a single concern, the UK government said yesterday: the privatisation will involve a major change for the รบ14m-a-year business and its 390 staff, providing payroll, personnel and other services to government departments and to the wider public sector.
PacifiCorp Holdings Inc, Portland, Oregon says it will not raise its $30 per share offer to minority holders of Pacific Telecom Inc.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc has put its new Pentium-class K5 microprocessor back another six months to the second half of next year: the company had originally promised it for this autumn, but the company wants more time to satisfy itself that the thing really is bug-free; to plug the revenue gap now that sales of Am486s are falling off much faster than forecast, the company plans to launch a simplified 75MHz version of the K5 that is pin-compatible with the 75MHz Pentium – code-named the SS/5-75, which will go on sale in limited quantities in the first quarter of 1996.
Merrill Lynch & Co has agreed to buy $8m in software and consulting services from NeXT Computer Inc over the next year: NeXT claims it is the largest order for object-oriented technology products to date.
Thorn EMI Plc is selling its entire 2.8% stake in SGS-Thomson Microelectronics NV – legacy of its sale of Inmos International NV in the latter’s global share offering.
Microsoft Corp and Visa International yesterday published a specification to secure payments over public and private networks: Secure Transaction Technology is designed to provide a secure method for handling payment card transactions over networks such as the Internet and to encourage widespread adoption of it, Microsoft and Visa are making the specification available at no charge to all card brands, financial institutions, software developers and the Internet community to create Secure Transaction Technology-compliant applications.
The stock of Santa Clara, California-based building block chip set designer OPTi Inc plunged yesterday down $5.50 to $12.50 in active trading on Nasdaq after the semi-conductor maker warned that its earnings for the latest quarter, will disappoint Wall Street: the company reported that its third quarter income will range between break-even to a profit of $0.05 a share, down sharply from analysts’ expectations of earnings of $0.35 to $0.43 a share and said that fourth-quarter earnings will fall significantly short of analysts’ estimates of $0.41 to $0.50 a share; OPTi blamed the poor results on a faster-than-expected drop in demand for products related to the 80486 microprocessor and larger-than-expected declines in sales prices for its audio controller.
We all know that it will count for nothing beside the obsessive desire of Chancellor Kohl to go down in history as the man that inflicted a single currency on an unprepared and unfit Europe, but Hans-Olaf Henkel, former head of IBM Deutschland GmbH and now head of the German Industry Federation has called for even tougher criteria for European monetary union, and says it would be better to delay the venture than start it with too few members: countries that qualify for monetary union must go beyond the Maastricht treaty and agree to even tougher criteria on budget deficits than called for in the treaty, he said, and must agree sanctions for those that fail to meet the criteria; The chance of a currency union being a community of stability would be lost forever if the convergence criteria were knowingly relaxed at the start and the circle of member countries were arrived at by political opportunism, he said.
Deutsche Telekom AG will prepare two separate earnings reports to satisfy German and US requirements.
Fujitsu Ltd aims to boost annual sales of Flash memory chips to the equivalent of $806.9m in the business year starting April 1 1997 from estimated sales of $232.0m for 1995-96, a company spokesman said: Fujitsu started operating a Flash memory production plant in Fukushima, northern Japan
early this year, jointly with Advanced Micro Devices Inc and monthly production will hit 10,000 eight-inch wafers by the year-end; Fujitsu plans to double production to 20,000 wafers a month by the end of 1996 and is considering expanding production facilities in 1997; the company said that it estimates its Flash memory sales for 1996-97 will be around $434m.
San Francisco, California-based speciality software firm Walker Interactive Systems Inc said it expects to post a third quarter share loss of $0.40 to $0.50 on turnover that will be within range of forecasts, or about equal to second quarter’s $13.6m: in the third quarter one year ago, the company lost $0.40 per share on turnover of $17.5m and in the second quarter ended June 30 1995 Walker lost $0.22 per share against a loss of $0.90 in 1993; the company blamed soft licence revenue and third quarter charges for the loss.
You make a grown man cry: PC Week Labs has found that if NetWare network administrators think there is any chance of one of their users installing Windows95, because a feature called File and Print Services for NetWare could, under some circumstances, cause a user on the network to block access to a NetWare server for an entire network or segment of a network – the paper assest that one of Windows95’s selling points is its ability to mimic a NetWare server so that network administrators have an easy way to add NetWare-compatible services on a network; in its default configuration, the Windows95-cum-NetWare server is visible only to other Windows95 clients, but a slight change in the configuration-enabling Server Advertising Protocol packets is all that is needed to make the Windows95 server visible to any NetWare client, the paper says, and the Windows95 server can be given the same name as a current NetWare server without the user getting any warning, so that when the Windows95 server is then connected to the network, it can block access to the same-named NetWare server for all other clients; the solution is for even Windows95-averse companies to install a bit of Windows95 – the Policy Manager utility, which is used to install administrative controls on the network and can prohibit users that connect to the network from making any changes to their network configuration – it works by placing a policy file on the network server that is automatically read by Windows95 when it connects to the net.
Unlike businesses, consumers don’t have budgets that need to be conserved in the early quarters but must be spent by the end of the year, but computer manufacturers seem to believe that they do – despite the fact that in the run-up to Christmas, many consumers have more presing things on which to spend their money: by focusing their marketing and advertising efforts in the fourth quarter, personal computer manufacturers are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about the personal computer business being a fourth-quarter business, says Nick Donatiello, president and chief executive of research house Odyssey Ventures Inc – but consumers aren’t telling us it’s a seasonal business, they’re expressing interest year round but they’re not being encouraged year round.
Canon Inc, Tokyo, said it is launching the world’s first business telephone system for small offices that operates entirely with wireless extensions: the market is expected to be mainly offices employing 10 or fewer persons, Canon said; in addition to conventional telephones and facsimile machines, the Air Talk system has capacity for eight wireless extensions using four external lines, Canon said.
