French telecommunications equipment maker Sagem SA has become the second French electronics company to capture a major contract to supply satellite television decoders in the US, Les Echos reports. With a contract to supply several hundred thousand decoders for satellite television start-up EchoStar, Sagem, via its California subsidiary DiViCom Inc joins its compatriot Thomson Multimedia SA as the premiere suppliers of digital satellite televsion equipment in North America. EchoStar, which expects to launch a service of 100 video and 250 audio channels plus data services at the end of the year, chose DiViCom, which already provides decoders for Bell Atlantic Corp’s interactive television experiment. DiViCom will supply the encoders, but the digital heart of the decoders will be manufactured in France and they will be assembled at Sagem’s factory in Greenville, South Carolina, where it specialises in automotive electronics. Deliveries are expected to begin next quarter and continue throughout 1996. Sagem produced 1.5m decoders in 1994, half of them for Canal Plus and the rest for export. The group has made a strategic bet on digital television; to further extend its expertise in digital imagery, it recently acquired bankrupt French television set manufacturer Kaisui SA.
