After three years of losses, including a $70m one last year, Madrid-based Siemens-Nixdorf Espana has finally been able to end a tax year with better news. It closed its books on September 30 with losses pf $7.8m on turnover of $131.8m. The company is predicting a return to profit in 1995. Speaking recently to Computerworld Espana, managing director Antonio Torrents said half of 1993’s losses were due to restructuring costs, estimated at between $31m and $38.8m. But a considerable effort had been made to cut back the period in which finance charges were due to be paid. Such commitments will end within 100 days. Torrents said the Spanish arm would concentrate on large accounts, while small and medium-sized companies who had been clients of either Siemens or Nixdorf would be looked after through an indirect sales network. It is Torrents’ objective to make the firm one of the top three computer companies in Spain and he recognised that too many mistakes have been made in the past. The merger of Siemens and Nixdorf was incorrectly handled and was marked by a lack of positive co-ordination and a failure to recognise the importance of the trump cards in the resultant company’s pack: the staff. He said that although Siemens and Nixdorf unions had not merged yet, relations were better. In terms of products, Torrents said the company has always focused strongly on Unix, and he claimed the company was the manufacturer with the most Unix equipment installed in Europe. He noted the ‘alternative’ Unix mainframes, capable of handling large volumes of data at high speed and the Unix-co-existent BS2000 line of mainframes. During fiscal 1994, the company sold 12,000 personal computers in Spain, an improvement on the 2,000 sold in 1993, but Torrents said the aim was to sell 40,000 a year. He said the cheap personal computer boom was over and the companies that would survive were those manufacturing large volumes and with strong research and development. It is for these reasons that companies could compete with the Taiwanese on price, Torrents declared. He added that the company was picking up new clients, large accounts.
