Faced with a drastic cutback in orders from AT&T this year, Olivetti plans to build as many Personalikes as it did last year, and grow its European sales by 50% to meet the shortfall in the US. AT&T accounted for 180,000 of the 500,000 machines Olivetti built last year, but is expected to take only between 60,000 and 80,000 this year. Olivetti sees West Germany as the prime untapped market, and looks for its Triumph-Adler acquisition to spearhead its campaign there – but according to the International Herald Tribune, it has found that the situation at the Nuremburg company is much worse than it imagined it to be when it agreed to buy it last year. Olivetti will be launching a new line of up-market 80386 and 80286 MS-DOS machines next month, looks for them to account for much of 1987 business – but does not yet know that they will be big sellers.
