Pyramid Technology Corp holders are not rushing to tender their shares to Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG in response to its $16 a share offer: only 1.268m have so far been tendered to add to the 2.717m, 17.5%, that Siemens already holds, and the offer has been extended until midnight on March 1.
The split of business at Hewlett-Packard Co is now 37% for the computer group – personal computers, workstations, servers and other systems, 42% for printers, scanners and other peripherals, 11% for test and measurement products, and 10% for other components and services, reckons Laura Conigliaro, an analyst at Prudential Securities.
Tulip Computers NV has received an $11.8m loan to finance expansion in the Far East: the facility was partly provided from a fund administered by the Dutch ministry of economic affairs, with the rest coming from a group of banks, insurers and pension funds, it said.
Bay Networks Inc opened its first Indian office in New Delhi and says it may consider launching manufacturing operations in India later.
The European Commission unconditionally cleared the telecommunications equipment joint venture between Siemens AG and Italtel SpA, which sees Siemens merging its Italian communications equipment subsidiary with Italtel; the new venture will control half the current market for public switching and transmission equipment in Italy.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB reports a contract with China’s Guangdong Mobile Communications Corp worth $102m for a cellular telephone network that will cover the entire province by the end of the year.
Control Data Systems Inc has now revealed that it paid $7.11m, $6.00 per share, for the shares it bought back from Silicon Graphics Inc.
Before you can begin the process of fabricating an integrated circuit, someone has to cast a Silicon ingot, slice it into wafers and polish the wafers until you can see tomorrow in them – and with all those chip companies with big and expanding plants up in the Oregon forests, demand for wafers is soaring: Siltec Corp, in Salem, Oregon is preparing to meet some of the demand and has just broken ground for a new $250m silicon manufacturing facility scheduled for completion in mid-1996; it will 6 and 8 – or 150mm and 200mm – silicon polished and epitaxial wafers and will ultimately employ some 400 people in addition to the 750 employees of its current North Salem facilities; Siltec is part of the big Far Eastern influx into the Pacific Northwest, being part of the Mitsubishi Materials Corp Silicon Division.
China plans to seek outside investment to rebuild Peking’s Zhongguancun district, locally known as China’s Silicon Valley: the project will start next year and take 15 years to complete; the Zhongguancun science town covers an area of some 0.66 of a square mile and is home to hundreds of research institutes and national laboratories, and to institutes of higher education such as Peking and Qinghua universities.
Sage Group Plc is to invest ú4m in a new technical support division adjoining its Newcastle headquarters; the new division will create 200 new jobs and expand technical support to over 300 employees by 1998 from 130 now, the firm said.
Redwood City, California-based Network Equipment Technologies Inc has won a significant OEM contract from Ericsson Business Networks AB, which is to offer the IDNX Micro 20 Communications Resource Manager as the MD110 Communications Resource Module packaged with its MD110 PABX to create the industry’s first combined PABX-Communications Resource Manager product for consolidation of speech and data traffic.
The combination of General Motors Corp Hughes satellites and Chinese rockets has a disconcerting 50% failure rate, and insurers are demanding that China and Hughes Space & Communications Co come clean on just what it was that caused that last satellite launch mishap – Chinese and foreign experts say last month’s explosion has similarities to a Hughes-Long March launch failure three years ago
, and If you ask me whether I’d insure a launch of a Hughes 601 on a Long March 2E today, I’d have to say no, Simon Clapham, a space insurance expert with Lloyd’s of London told Dow Jones & Co in Shanghai – We’re going to be asking very tough and direct questions, he declared.
Woodbury, New York-based Cablevision Systems Corp reports that its Cablevision Lightpath Inc unit has signed an interconnect agreement with Nynex Corp for completion of local telephone calls: the two will pay reciprocal compensation in exchange for terminating calls on each other’s networks and the two also agreed number portability; Nynex expects to sign similar agreements with several other carriers.
Stevenage, Hertfordshire-based ServiceTec Plc has won a three year, ú5m contract to maintain the personal computer networks, and some peripherals, of British Telecommunications Plc’s Midlands and Southern Home Counties zones: this will involve 30 ServiceTec engineers working in-house across the two zones servicing 30,000 boxes.
While there is widespread desire to get a telecommunications deregulation bill through Congress and onto the US statute book as soon as possible, pious hopes that it could all be settled by midsummer are as unrealistic as the idea that Europe could start the introduction of single currency in 1997 (strange, isn’t it, how the ludicrously over-ambitious, fiendishly difficult and potentially economically devastating concept of a single currency is intended to happen as soon as 1997 whereas the simple and entirely beneficial process of introducing competition into European voice telephony can’t begin until 1998) – Senate Democrats are resisting Republican efforts to achieve rapid root-and-branch deregulation of US telecommunications businesses and go much further than Congress considered last year, and a 99-page Democratic proposal for reform ignores Republican proposals to lift cable television rate regulation, remove restrictions on ownership of television stations, and allow the Baby Bells to provide long-distance services by a fixed date – under the Democratic proposal, the Bells, before entering the long-distance or manufacturing markets, would have to prove to the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission that they had opened themselves to local telephone competition; AT&T Corp cheered the proposals, while the Bells groaned.
Dallas, Texas-based CompuCom Systems Inc and Princeton, New Jersey-based Trellis Network Services Inc have torn up the letter of intent they signed last month that would have had CompuCom taking over Trellis; CompuCom wanted to expand its systems engineering side, for which it bought International Micronet Systems Inc of San Francisco in December; Trellis provides enterprise network integration services.
Newbridge Networks Corp won contracts for three significant Frame Relay networks in Europe: customers are the TeleWest Communications Group Ltd UK joint venture between Tele-Communications Inc and US West Inc; the Telegroup Finnish consortium of 46 private telephone companies and their affiliates; and the Amsterdam Police Force; TeleWest chose Newbridge through UK distributor Mercury Communications Ltd.
Concurrent Computer Corp has shipped its first Maxion multiprocessor system to use the 200MHz version of the R4400 – and it had to go all the way to Cathay to get the order: customer is the Beijing Institute of Electronic System Engineering.
Novell Inc has appointed Oxford-based Digital Computer Services Ltd’s Singapore arm, DCS (Singapore) Pte Ltd as a Novell Authorised Service Centre; DCS launches its entire suite of Novell Network Services in Singapore this month.
Rutherford, New Jersey-based Nextel Communications Inc is to acquire Greenville, South Carolina-based Dial Page Inc for 21.7m new Nextel shares, putting an indicated value of $260m on the deal; Dial Page also entered into an agreement to sell its paging business to MobileMedia Communications Inc for $188.5m, and Dial Page holders could receive a
dditional Nextel shares if the net proceeds from a paging sale consummated within one year after the merger exceed $65m.
Texas Instruments Inc and IMEC, a Belgian independent research and development organisation, say they are collaborating on research for an 0.18 micron photolithography process to enable migration from fabrication of today’s Megabit-class memory chips to Gigabit-class memory chips in around five years.
Essen-based energy and technology company RWE AG, which is said to be in talks to make AT&T Corp its strategic partner, has teamed up with five other electricity companies – Badenwerk, BEWAG, Energieversorgung Schwaben, Hamburgische Electrizitaets-Werke, VEAG and the Vereinigten Elektrizittswerken Westfalen, planning to link their existing internal networks to create a nationwide high-speed telephone network, which they hope to have ready for liberalisation when it arrives; however it is believed in some quarters that Germany will go for regional competition with Deutsche Telekom AG, and will not license any rival carrier for the whole country: in this belief, British Telecommunications Plc and its German partner Viag AG are concentrating their efforts on Bavaria.
San Jose-based Alliance Semiconductor Corp has paid $10m to join the group of customer-investors in Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Pte Ltd of Singapore: the deal gives Alliance guaranteed capacity in Chartered’s new 8 wafer fabrication facility, currently under construction and due to begin production in the second half of the year; at an estimated cost of $800m, the new Fab II will have capacity of 24,000 8 wafers monthly, with technology process capability ranging from 0.5 to 0.2 microns; the company already invested $15m in a similar company, United Microelectronics Corp in Taiwan.
Shareholders in US Paging Corp approved the company’s acquisition by Mobile Telecommunication Technologies Corp, Jackson, Mississippi, and the transaction was completed.
At this rate, the European Commission is soon going to decide that the UK has an unfair competitive advantage as a result of its relatively low cost of telephone calls and order that prices be raised: only Iceland has cheaper phone service according to an International Telecommunications Users Group survey of tariffs, which looked at the charges for a basket of different kinds of calls and determined that its package cost ú1.42 in Iceland, ú1.62 in the UK, ú2.73 in the US, ú5.50 in Japan and ú5.57 in Germany, where making a 60-mile call costs almost four times as much as it does in the UK or in the US.
The state of Massachusetts and India’s southern state of Karnataka yesterday signed an agreement to become sister states, a relationship intended to help foster a faster flow of investment and an exchange of trade delegations by the two regions; the agreement also provides for educational and cultural exchanges; at the same time, Analog Devices Inc and Tata Elxsi Ltd signed an agreement for joint development and marketing of videoconferencing products at a new development centre at Bangalore to be established by Analog Devices in June which will employ about 50.
Intuit Inc has put the extraordinary general meeting of shareholders called to vote on Microsoft Corp’s offer for the company to April 10 from March 24, and will postpone it again to August, if regulators have not approved the deal by April.
Commenting on its performance in 1994, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA says its basic mainframe businesses, Enterprise Systems and Customer Service, managed to contain their rate of shrinkage to 8%; the six other businesses, Open Systems and Software, Personal Computers, Systems Integration and Services, Systems Operations, Emerging Technologies, Manufacturing, Logistics and Purchasing, grew by an aggregate 23% and accounted for 52% of total turnover, up from 45% in 1993; US-based businesses account for more than 30% of sales worldwide, and Zenith Data Systems moved into operating profit in the fourth quarter, and grew
its business 36% in North America, 13% in Europe; on privatisation, Industry Minister Jose Rossi has said that the government has already decided on five companies that will take stakes in Bull of at least 10% each; there is no timetable set for completion.
Atlantic Tele-Network Inc, of St Croix in the Virgin Islands is feeling the backwash of Deutsche Telekom AG’s crackdown on offshore telephone sex lines after extensive allegations of fraud: it says that the German national phone company has cut off direct-dial audiotext traffic to foreign destinations and as a result, its Guyana Telephone & Telegraph Co unit has lost traffic that represented almost a third of its audiotext volume last quarter.
Compagnie Generale des Eaux SA is trying again to float General Cable Plc, having pulled the London and New York flotation of the cable television and telephone service operator last year after hitting adverse market conditions: proceeds will be used to fund operations, develop networks and repay debt.
Nokia Oy has followed L M Ericsson Telefon AB in implicitly suggesting that Motorola Inc’s cellular inventory build-up is a problem peculiar to the US company: it says its mobile phones sales have been proceeding as planned and it does not suffer from the kind of inventory build-up problem hitting Motorola.
MCI Communications Corp is creating 475 new jobs at its residential sales centre in Greenville, South Carolina, adding to the 350 workers it hired there in November: MCI credits the success of its Friends & Family calling programme for the expansion at the Greenville base.
BellSouth Corp reports that it has now launched its cellular network in New Zealand’s South Island, opening up competition for Telecom Corp of New Zealand Ltd’s network.
Correction: ú482,722 was the gross profit, not the pre-tax figure at Standard Platforms Holdings Plc for the year to September 30 1994; the company’s share issue is a placing and open offer of 13.3m new shares with 6.3m of them subject to clawback to the extent that holders wish to subscribe; the issue will raise ú1.5m all told, ú250,000 of which is for development of new products (CI No 2,594).
IBM officials sporting AIX 5 badges raised considerable excitement among hacks assembled for IBM Corp’s AIX strategy briefing at EuroDisney last week, who thought at first they might have stumbled through a time warp since AIX is stuck firmly on release 4 – then IBM, which loves rewriting history, pointed out that the badges referred not to AIX Version 5, but to five years of IBM Unix, where in fact, all through the 1980s, it had Unixes coming out of its ears – on personal computers, on Series/1 minis, on 68000s, even on 4300s – but it simply didn’t put any of its marketing muscle behind them.
