They value these things rather differently over there – according to the Evening Standard, at the time Unipalm Group Plc agreed to be acquired by UUNet Technologies Inc, the UK company was doing ú17.7m a year, UUNet only $12.5m – yet UUNet was valued at $1,000m on Nasdaq, Unipalm at only ú100m in London.
Apple Computer Inc regained second place in worldwide personal computer shipments from IBM Corp in the third quarter, according to Dataquest, which says that Compaq Computer Corp remained top of the tree and Packard Bell Electronics Inc and NEC Corp were fourth and fifth; overall, the global personal computer market grew 21% in the quarter with 14.2m units shipped; Apple won a 9% share in the quarter, up from only 7.4% in the previous quarter.
Siemens AG plans to cut 200 jobs at its Speyer plant, which produces components for telecommunications equipment, reducing the workforce to 900 from 1,100 with 90 of the cuts coming before the end of the year: the cuts are down to a weak order book and price pressures from Asian competitors; firings are not ruled out; the plant did $230m in sales in the year to September
Westinghouse Electric Corp is expected to complete its $5,400m deal to acquire CBS Inc when the network’s shareholders meet in New York on November 16 to approve it.
The IBM Corp product delays continue to mount up, and after all the mainframe and storage holdups, we hear that ships to UK customers for medium and large PowerPC AS-based AS/400s have slipped to February or March next year: it seems even the low-end models are in short supply and only a few will ship this year; word from the US is not to look for any volume ships before next April.
Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc says 300,000 PlayStations have been sold since the launch on September 9 and Nintendo of America Inc says that Nintendo Co’s worldwide sales of games have passed 1,000m.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB has bought 40% more of the equity in Spanish electronics group Indelec SA from the Society for the Promotion of the Basque Industry bringing its holding in the company to 90%: Ericsson first bought a stake of Indelec, which makes for radio in the local loop and is a supplier to Telefonica de Espana SA, in 1993; no financial details were provided.
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Novell Inc says the sale of Wordperfect will not include the Groupwise division, whose groupware applications are among the company’s fastest-growing products, and it is also hanging on to the Perfectworks cheap and cheerful entry-level program that combines several applications and has been folded into its Internet access unit: Novell says it has two potential buyers interested in the business, but once you know that an executive close to Computer Associates International Inc has said that it is not interested, it gets extremely difficult to come up with potential buyers, although IBM Corp looks a fairly good bet and former Novell chief Ray Noorda is a possibility.
AT&T Corp has formed AT&T Personal Online Services to bring individuals and families lifestyle information from mid-1996, with the first information being a health and fitness service, supplied by IVI Publishing Inc, which will provide tips on health and nutrition: it will be accessible from any on-line service that offers access to the World Wide Web; AT&T said pricing was flexible, but gave no details.
Getting it right first time is something we should all strive for and it is a tremendous strength that if you put the front page of a copy of the New York Times alongside today’s copy, they are recognisably the same newspaper, so it is noteworthy that over a period when IBM Corp has successively called its mainframes (which started out as System/360) System/370, 303X, 308X, 3090, ES/3090, ES/9000 (or System/390) and 9672, Hewlett-Packard Co has called its proprietary business computers the HP 3000.
