Commenting on the termination of negotiations for Comparex Informationssysteme GmbH to acquire the European operations of National Advanced Systems, Comparex UK’s strategic planning manager Aled Hughes said that the West German parent ultimately decided that it didn’t want to acquire NAS. He says that the cost, although affordable, was very high. Secondly, the integration of staff and cultures would have been difficult, leading to a short term clash that would only have benefited competitors. And thirdly, distribution channels would have been radically altered, not necessarily to the good of the current Comparex customer base. Hughes believes that the arrangement now is to the advantage of both companies, and will also benefit Hitachi, adding that he is delighted that the protracted period of uncertainty is over. Unlike many, he doesn’t see the situation as an unstable one likely to lead to a price war. He feels that if NAS and Comparex win contracts, then Hitachi wins either way, and the real competition is IBM. He also discounts the possibility of Hitachi ultimately buying Comparex, since BASF AG and Siemens AG are getting excellent returns from their investment in the company and wouldn’t be interested in selling. On that front, the company reports that sales in West Germany for the first half of 1989 were down slightly at the equivalent of $110m, but that outside Germany, business grew 9% to $140m, with France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain doing particularly well. Peripherals now account for 50% of turnover, processors 34%, not least because of extraordinarily strong demand for disk subsystems, which at times exceeded immediately available supply – sales for the half would otherwise have been higher, the Mannheim-based company comments.
