Following the time-honoured American corporate tradition of waiting until Friday if you have bad news to impart, National Semiconductor Corp ended the week with the news that it will restructure its Information Systems Group and reduce the unit’s workforce by approximately 450 people, taking an $18m bath with the figures for its quarter of fiscal 1989. The unit includes the National Advanced Systems IBM-compatible mainframe business, which has been causing the company such headaches in the US, but the brunt of the restructuring will fall on its Datachecker Systems arm, which is withdrawing its flagship Series 3000 programmable retail system from market. Datachecker will also consolidate marketing and engineering functions currently based in Littleton, Massachusetts; Phoenix and back home in Santa Clara into one organization in Santa Clara. The company says that while the 3000 represented some of the most advanced technology in retail systems today, the difficulties we experienced in bringing the product to market caused us to miss an important market opportunity. NatSemi also said it considers analysts’ projections for the fiscal first quarter, which range from 15 cents to 20 cents per share, to be too high: its Information Systems Group has been affected by external forces, primarily pricing and margin pressure in the mainframe market.
Content from our partners
