As part of its restructuring and recovery programme, Glenrothes Winchester disk drive manufacturer Rodime Plc is to sell its Rodime Systems retail disk drive marketing business to Profit Technology Inc, New York for cash and paper; the company is also celebrating a supply agreement for 210Mb and 100Mb 3.5 disks from Hewlett-Packard Co Apollo Systems Division. Rodime expects to get about $7m in cash, a promissory note for $300,000 and about $1.46m in Profit Technology shares for the Rodime Systems business, which markets Rodime disk subsystems for the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh, giving Rodime about 3% of Profit. The cash will go to reducing Rodime’s debt. Profit will operate the acquisition as a wholly-owned subsidiary called Rodime Systems Inc and is expected to take on 65 Rodime employees. Rodime will retain an exclusive renewable five-year supply agreement with Profit to provide Rodime Systems with specified classifications of 3.5 disk drives. The company believes it is best to get out of retail and concentrate on OEM business: it sees the biggest market for its 100Mb and 200Mb drives as being with workstation and high end personal computer manufactur ers. The supply agreement with Hewlett specifies the 18mS 210Mb RT3259T and 100Mb RS3128T SCSI drives for use in the Apollo Series 2500; Hewlett is also qualifying Ro dime drives for other existing and future workstations. The drives will be made both at Glenrothes and at the Singapore plant. Rodime’s results are in page five, inside.
