IBM France SA expects a gentle shedding of between 1,900 and 2,000 employees during 1995 via an attractive early retirement incentive programme, personnel director Michel Antoine told Agence France Presse: Antoine said that over 2,300 employees of the appropriate age group had expressed interest in the plan presented to them in November – and That will be a lot more than is necessary for us to reach our target for 1995 of between 1,900 and 2,000 employees he said; the move, which is expected to be costly, will enable IBM France to avoid making any outright lay-offs. – o – As the death toll from the Kobe earthquake reached 4,047 just after midnight local time yesterday, with 21,671 injured and 727 still missing, suggesting that a grim toll of over 5,000 dead will be reached, estimates of the cost of the damage were settling around $50,000m, but worries about serious shortages in the electronic sector seem to be misplaced: companies are handicapped mainly by damage to subcontractors’ facilities rather than their own plants, and by interruption of water and other utility supplies; Mitsubishi Electric Corp reports that there were no employee injuries or deaths and no collapsed buildings at any of its semiconductor and related electronic component plants in the Kobe and Osaka areas – only one facility, the company’s Kitaitami Works, has been temporarily closed for safety and damage assessment but the main production facilities for memory products and microcontrollers are its Saijo and Kochi factories, which have no major damage; KTI Semiconductor Inc hopes to get its memory chip plant working again very soon. – o – IBM Corp says it has now shipped more than 1m copies of OS/2 Warp, and is celebrating the fact that Osborne Computer Corp Pty Ltd of Sydney, Australia’s biggest personal computer manufacturer has come the raw prawn with Microsoft Corp to the extent of telling Microsoft where it can stick its OEM agreements for MS-DOS and Windows, and will pre-load PC-DOS and Warp on all high and low-end machines, although it is sticking with Windows for Workgroups on its mid-range. – o – Long-distance operator Sprint Corp, of Kansas City, Missouri says it is cutting 400 jobs from its long-distance telephone operations, citing an expected decline in fourth-quarter long-distance profits from the previous quarter and the effect of improvements in its technology.
Compagnie des Machines Bull SA is also preparing to spin off its factory in Angers, which handles printed circuit boards and personal computer assembly as a separate wholly-owned company, Les Echos reprorted: it is to be called Bull Electronics Angers, and the factory management expects to save about $4m on taxes and through outsourcing services; Charles Dehelly, Bull’s manufacturing division manager, said the worldwide manufacturing operations expect to do about $450m in 1995, compared with $320m last year as a result of a 40% rise in its Smart Card and subcontracting activity for Packard Bell Electronics Inc, Zenith, IBM Corp and, soon, Motorola Inc; although quarantining the division will not change the status of its personnel, it would make it easier for Bull to sell it off, something that of course worries the staff – one CGT union representative said, We are opposed to the spin-off that is likely to lead to the loss of an industrial capability for the company; Bull has already created several independent subsidiaries, including facilities management specialist Integris and software engineering firm Transtar (with Thomson SA systems subsidiary Syseca); Nipson, which makes printers, is set to be sold off, while Bull Emerging Technologies is being reorganised. – o – If you read that Sybase Inc has bought Powersoft Corp, don’t believe a word of it: the two companies’ shareholders aren’t even due to vote on the proposed combination of the two firms until February 9.
Cray Research Inc reports orders from five German institutions for compact supercomputers: it has orders for Cray J916s from the Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute, Karl
sruhe; the Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar & Marine Research, Bremerhaven; the University of Konstanz Computer Centre and the Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam; a Cray EL92 is wanted by the University of Braunschweig Institute for Heat & Fuel Technology. – o – Deutsche Aerospace AG, aerospace division of Daimler-Benz AG, is forming a flight control joint venture with Rockwell International Corp: capitalised at $325,000 and equally-owned, it will be based in Ulm, Germany, and will plan and market avionics products such as satellite-aided flight control systems; product development and production will stay with the parents.
Little Rock, Arkansas-based Alltel Corp’s Alltel Mobile Communications unit and BellSouth Corp’s BellSouth Mobility have definitive agreement to create a partnership comprising cellular properties owned by the two companies in five markets: the agreement is contingent on BellSouth getting a licence to provide Personal Communications Service in the Carolinas, but would also provide for the sale of some BellSouth cellular interests in North and South Carolina to Alltel – the Baby Bell must divest some Carolina cellular holdings if it is awarded one of the new-fangled licences.
Compagnie des Machines Bull SA has apparently won, morally at least, its case against Texas Instruments Inc, proving the validity of its patent for Smart Cards – Bull confirmed a report in Les Echos that it dropped its legal action at the end of December after the two signed an agreement allowing Texsa to use the patent; further information was unavailable, as Bull is in the process of bringing its formerly autonomous Bull CP8 SA Smart Card unit back into its banking automation group, so the company will have a complete banking product line.
Imax Corp signed a letter of intent with Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA and Tempo Libero to explore high-tech out-of-home entertainment opportunities: the three plan a company to identify commercial and institutional sites in Italy for Imax movie technologies, including cinemas to show Imax 3D and Ridefilm movies.
Management Technologies Inc, New York has now completed the purchase of Desisco, the London-headquartered trading systems division of Digital Equipment Corp for about $10m: the unit, now renamed MTI Trading Systems, is expected to add more than $15m to Management Technologies’ annual revenues, resulting in an estimated group annual total revenue in excess of $40m; the company is in process of turning itself into a financial services holding company that grows through acquisition, and bought Winter Partners AG, the international banking systems company doing $25m a year.
AT&T Corp, which reckons it won 35% of the Frame Relay market in 1994, has given a new multi-year contract worth more than $100m to StrataCom Inc, San Jose for IPX and BPX Asynchronous Transfer Mode cell switches, which are being used to offer Frame Relay services to customers on AT&T’s InterSpan network, and for interoperability between Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer. – o – Was, dealers in the City are musing, Wednesday’s jump in the shares of Tadpole Technology Plc an indication that they had been oversold, or was it just a dead frog bounce?
