Hoping to lay to rest the hare started by an interview given to the Wall Street Journal by a top Siemens AG staffer, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG management board chairman Hans-Dieter Wiedig said at the opening of the Cebit Hannover Fair yesterday that his company had no plans for a strategic link with another computer company. He said that like all computer manufacturers, Siemens Nixdorf was in various co-operation talks, but these did not include financial ties. We have no intention of taking a stake in another company, nor is there any other company that wants to take a stake in Siemens Nixdorf and become a dominant partner, he said. The loss-making company is moving into the second stage of its restructuring with the establishment on April 1 of four system units and six additional business units in an effort to give the company an organisation that reflects an increasingly differentiated market. The focus of the nine business units will be on services and software and includes such areas as office automation, personal computers and networking systems. Each business unit will have price, planning and production responsibility, including choice of sales channels. The four system units will be organised around products – mainframe computers, mid-range, self-service terminal systems and application software, and is intended significantly to cut the time it takes for products to get to market – the aim is to cut in half the time it takes to develop products and bring them to the market. Siemens Nixdorf has decided to buy in commercially available printed circuit boards and concentrate on production of complex boards at its Augsburg plant, but there are no further plant closure plans beyond those in Berlin and Cologne already announced. In the small business area, the company is passing customers on to resellers – it now has a network of 29 independent businesses that exclusively sell its hardware and products, and some 300 employees have transferred to these German partners. The company hopes to cut losses this year, but does not see any increase in turnover after translation into marks, although volume will rise. In the first five months of the current year, sales fell 6% compared with last year at $2,750m. Orders in the UK rose by 15% in the first five months.
