STC Plc has finally decided that ICL has to get into the US market if it is to survive as a major computer company, and having agreed to buy Computer Consoles Inc – quite as valuable for its computer business to ICL as its other activities are to the STC side of the house – STC has moved to make ICL a leading player in retail systems in the US market by agreeing to pay $90m for the Datachecker Systems Inc business of National Semiconductor Corp. Net assets of Datachecker are put at over $50m, and the company did about $200m turnover in the past 12 months. Under the agreement, STC will also pay royalties to NatSemi for three years on patents and trademarks for use in retail systems. The acquisition will turn ICL into a major player in retail systems worldwide: Datachecker, which was expanded with the acquisition of Data Terminal Systems five years ago, is the second player in the US market after NCR Corp; ICL already has a foothold in the US market on its own account as a result of the business it acquired with Singer Business Machines 14 years ago, and by combining its own and Datachecker’s product lines with the fault-tolerant Unix transaction processing systems built by Computer Consoles Inc, there is very substantial scope for a major expansion of the business.
