Yesterday’s attempts by National Semiconductor Corp to present the UK press with its annual financial results were somewhat handicapped by the discovery that company accountants had been unable to provide a full set of figures for the year to May 31 they should be out today. However, the company man-aged to indicate that turnover for the year ending May 1988 would be in the region of $2,500m – a rise of some 39% over last year’s $1,870m – with the split between the Semiconductors and Information Systems divisions being around $1,400m and $1,100m respectively. The Information Systems division, the more active of the two in European terms, now contains four separate segments: by far the largest is the IBM-compatible mainframe and peripherals supplier, National Advanced Systems, which saw significant sales increases last year, is claimed to be growing at an annual rate of 20%, and is expected to contribute around $800m to corporate coffers this year – a substantial part of which will ultimately find its way back to Hitachi Ltd in Tokyo. The second major division, expected to report a turnover of some $250m, is Datachecker Systems Inc, which provides a range of products for the electronic point of sale market, but is showing a slow annual growth rate of 5%. Bringing up the rear and each hovering around the $50m turnover mark are the board-level products division, Microcomputer products, and the newest-born Engineering/Scientific Systems DEC-IBM networking peripherals division.
The company also took the opportunity to discuss at some length its plans for the future. Essentially, NatSemi has developed a series of plans to respond to Dataquest predictions, which highlight the growing areas of the electronic equipment market as data processing, communications, industrial equipment and transportation. Convinced that, within the data processing segment, the workstation market will grow at an annual rate of 27% well into the 1990s, the company’s Semiconductor division will focus upon increasing the input-output performance of its hard disk controllers, and expanding the advanced graphics capabilities of its graphic chip sets. It will also concentrate on providing ECL logic, gate arrays and standard cells for the high-performance computer market. Developments targeted at the communications market include Ethernet and ISDN controllers, with process and motion controllers singled out for the industrial and transportation markets. Overall, the company argues that its Semiconductor division will continue to maintain a very strong committment to proprietary applications-oriented VSLI solutions. Meanwhile, plans for the Information Systems Group include trebling turnover within the rapidly-expanding Engineering/Scientific Systems division, and doubling activity within the Microcomputer Products division – which is currently showing an annual growth rate of some 50% according to the company.
