Uncomfirmed gossip has a big shake-up under way at Tadpole Technology Plc’s US operations, and yesterday, the company asked for trading in its shares to be suspended pending release of the interim results: the suspension ended a steep slide that had seen the shares slump to 135 pence when the price went indicative yesterday morning ahead of suspension; they had come all the way down from 218 pence on May 3.
Another one taking a tumble yesterday was telecommunications equipment manufacturer Telspec Plc, whose shars slumped 39 pence yesterday morning to 465 pence after the company said its financial performance in the first half of the current year will reflect lower first quarter trading levels: it said its current order book stood at ú64m, marginally up on the ú62m it reported with its annual results on March 22; it believes full-year results will meet its expectations; sales in the first quarter were ú12.1m, up 81% on the first quarter last year – not enough, it seems.
Texas Instruments Inc won $51.8m damages from a federal district court jury against Cypress Semiconductor Corp, VLSI Technology Inc and LSI Logic Corp after the trio was found to have infringed Texas Instrument’s patents by selling semiconductor devices manufactured using its plastic encapsulation process: Cypress was ordered to pay $17.8m, LSI $14.6m, and VLSI $19.4m; they say they will be lodging an appeal against the verdict.
Amstrad Plc’s InfoPad Personal Digital Assistant, due in the autumn, will reportedly use a proprietary operating system called Eros on the Hitachi Ltd SH7034 32-bit RISC microcontroller because all the commercial operating systems need too much memory where Eros, derived from the Japanese I-Tron, and all the in-built applications fit into a 512Kb ROM; applications will include diary and address book, and a paging receiver that works on the Euromessage 466MHz UHF frequency; an interface to Groupe Sepeciale Mobile digital cellular networks is also in the plan; Eros has two main modules, Adam and Eve, to provide data management and visual user-interface functions.
Singapore personal computer and point-of-sale specialist IPC Corp Ltd has set up a representative office in Japan, which will provide a range of technical, sales and product support services to IPC’s four distributors in the country.
The US Justice Department’s case against acquisition by Microsoft Corp of Intuit Inc is seen to be damaged by the deal under which BankAmerica Corp and NationsBank Corp are buying Meca Software Inc from H & R Block Co Inc, since the banks said they will use Meca to become active in the on-line financial services market, making it less easy to argue that Microsoft’s size and market dominance, combined with Intuit’s personal finance software, would stifle competition.
Cable & Wireless Plc will charge ú178m of goodwill against its 1994-95 profit and loss account, representing all the remaining goodwill left in the 1988 acquisition of Telephone Rentals Plc: When we acquired this business, we do so in order to achieve rapid growth in Mercury’s business customer base and for its network services, finance director Rod Olsen said; however, now that we have decided to focus Mercury’s activities on service provision, we are seeking purchasers for the non-strategic elements of the former Telephone Rentals activities in the UK.
Texas Utilities Co is to take a stake in PCS PrimeCo Inc’s Personal Communications Services businesses in Texas: PCS PrimeCo is the four-way partnership of AirTouch Communications Inc, Bell Atlantic Corp, Nynex Corp and US West Inc; Texas Utilities will hold a 20% limited partnership interest in the operations the consortium will be starting in the Dallas, Houston and San Antonio trading areas next year.
Kansas City, Missouri-based Hallmark Cards Inc is to pay $80m for a 9.9% stake in London broadcast media provider Flextech Plc, which has an interest in or manages 13 cable and satellite channels that broadcast to the UK and the rest of Europe; US We
st Inc also took a 9% stake in the firm, where Tele-Communications Inc has a 60.4% stake; Flextech is also reportedly talking to Sega Enterprises Ltd about launching an interactive video games channel in the UK next year.
Spectrum Signal Processing Inc says it has signed a contract to provide the stereo sound board for IBM Corp’s Options By IBM products: the board uses the new MDSP2780 version of IBM’s Mwave signal processor.
Singapore’s National Computer Board wants $4.4m of software engineering products and service from IBM Corp.
AT&T Corp is far from happy with the terms set for liberalisation in Germany, the International Herald Tribune reports, because they allow Deutsche Telekom AG to charge whatever it likes for access to the local loop, so that if competitors are not allowed to build alternative infrastructure well before 1998, they will be at the giant’s mercy – and will have to tip it off to their plans when they negotiate, ensuring that they get undercut; Telekom reportedly sets such high access charges that in many cases it is cheaper to route calls via London or New York than pay them.
The over-excitement on Wall Street that is driving the indices to new all-time highs – the Dow Jones Index went through 4,400 for the first time on Wednesday – is causing analysts to turn bearish on stocks like Microsoft Corp and Intel Corp not because there is any expectation of a blip in their onward and upward marches, but simply because their share prices appear to have outrun all reason; meantime in London, investors would like to buy US stocks in the belief that the dollar must turn upwards soon, but daren’t because prices seem much too high, would like to buy in Tokyo because the market there is still so low, but daren’t because when the dollar turns, the fall in the value of the yen would wipe out any gains the market made, and they don’t even want to buy the London market, because although it looks fairly valued and with a bit more to go for, they know that when Wall Street tumbles down from its highs, London will fall away in sympathy.
The Costa Rican government shut down the cellular telephone operations of Millicom of Costa Rica SA, 70% owned by Millicom International Holdings SA of Luxembourg, after the Supreme Court court found last year that the pany operated in violation of the con stitutionally-mandated telecommunications monopoly of the state-run Costa Rican Electricity Institute: Millicom brought cellular telephone service to Costa Rica in 1987 through a contract with the generator that allowed Millicom to transmit cellular telephone signals to the national telephone network, and began its own service last year; the contract was successfully challenged by the phone company union in the Supreme Court, which ordered the government either to reform the constitution to allow private telephone services or to shut down Millicom by May 9.
Rounding up the processors chosen by the leading players for the next generation of games machines with some of the gaps filled in by the Microprocessor Report, Nintendo Co Ltd’s Ultra 64 uses the 64-bit MIPS Technologies Inc R4300i (the bus width is 32 bits) – an R4200 derivative clocked at 100MHz and optimised for graphics, which is fabricated for it by NEC Corp; Sega Enterprises Ltd has gone for two of Hitachi Ltd’s SH7604 RISCs – 32-bit parts, coupled with an SH-1, which is a first generation member of the SH7000 family, in the Saturn; Sony Corp uses a 32-bit MIPS core integrated with proprietary graphics engine, the complex chip put together for it by LSI Logic Corp to create what it calls the PlayStation CPU; the 3DO Co Interactive Multiplayer specification uses an Advanced RISC Machines Ltd ARM 600, and will move to the PowerPC 602 – a 32-bit part with a 64-bit bus but no double-precision floating point, something the MIPS R4300i does have; Atari Corp’s said-to-be-64-bit RISC, used in the Jaguar, remains a mystery.
Bethesda, Maryland-based limited partnership American Personal Communications LP reports th
at it has been awarded a US patent for technology to enables Personal Communications Services to share wireless frequency with existing microwave systems, and has received the first devices using the technology from Stanford Telecommunications Inc; although microwave users are to be moved to new frequencies, that will take several years, and in the meantime, the new operators will be able to share the frequencies; the firm has a pioneers preference licence covering 8m people in District of Columbia, in Maryland, and some of Virginia and West Virginia.
Luxembourg plans legislation to end the state phone company’s monopoly, Communications Minister Mady Delvaux Stehres told Reuters; many foreign firms are interested in setting up in business in Luxembourg, particularly to supply phone services, she added; Luxembourg will not use the two-year extension it obtained from the European Community to comply with the liberalisation directive, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said last week.
LDDS Communications Corp says it is in talks with a number of regional Bell operating companies about helping them provide the long distance connections now to be permitted for their cellular phone customers.
Toshiba Corp has introduced 21 new personal computer models to the Japanese market and renewed all its current models in an effort to lift its personal computer sales at home: it says it is also planning to start manufacturing personal computers offshore, somewhere elsewhere in Asia, to get around the pain caused it by the towering yen.
