As for the market gossip about STC Plc talking about a possible sale of ICL to Olivetti SpA, although the new management at STC has never been entirely comfortable with ICL, which was acquired by the previous regime, it knows that outright sale of the company abroad would cause the mother and father of all political rows – and there’s no obvious UK buyer of the business either: after four full years of benign neglect, STC has in the past three months been cautiously moving to make acquisitions to strengthen ICL’s position, and still has modest hopes that it may somehow find the mythical convergence of computers and telecommunications that has eluded so many major players from IBM and AT&T down; meantime alliances and product exchanges with computer companies on the continent are very much on the cards for ICL.
