Clearly committed to expanding its third party maintenance and support services arm, Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire-based Quest Group Plc has announced the acquisition for an undisclosed sum of Whitechapel Workstation’s support, service and repair operations, together with a proportion of Whitechapel’s stocks (CI No 926). In the light of the Whitechapel acquisition, Quest is estimating a UKP4.5m turnover for services and support this year, within a projected UK turnover of some UKP20m. Quests’s two other UK strands are distribution – notably Novell local area networking products – and end-user selling, targeted at the IBM 6150 – RT Personal Computer – market and strengthened by the acquisition of Grist, a Southampton-based IBM Systems Centre, earlier this year (CI No 847). 50% of Quest’s business – also valued for this year at UKP20m – is still export-based: the company is currently involved in a perestroika-generated joint venture with the Soviet Ministry of Instrumentation to develop a Moscow-based systems house, and continues to export its printed circuit board design products and large photo plotters to the Eastern bloc. Big sellers in Japan and the US are the Micropad and Dynamic Pad, which have evolved from the former Quest Automation’s original Datapad handprint data entry device.
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