By the middle of this year Philips NV’s big West German Philips Kommunikationsindustrie, PKI, will have dispensed with between 200 to 300 of the leading staff in its Siegen-based Office Communications division, reports Computerwoche. According to a Philips press release, the personnel adaptions are related to the exit of Karl Hecken, former Office Communications boss, and the development of the organisation and market. The staff affected were taken on between 1985 and 1987 by Hecken and former Siegen division leader Dieter Kaden expressly to bring in contracts from large enterprises. But Kaden had left PKI by mid-December, apparently after receiving a letter (so secret that everyone at the firm knew about it, claims one insider) from PKI chairman Manfred Konrad calling for him to set up a team to bring about the merging of PKI’s Public Sector operation with the Communications Systems arm – a brief that presumably did not appeal to Kaden. Now, with both Kaden and Hecken gone, there are rumours circulating at Siegen that top management want to see a return to the small business data processing market, despite the widespread concern that, as one Philips observer put it, it will never work – they could even end up like Nixdorf. Nevertheless, the fact that the staff previously working on small company accounts have stayed on, reporting to Kaden’s temporary stand-in Horst Huniken, seems to substantiate the gossip; other people reckon that Philips is ready to sell the PKI division, which is expected to turn in losses for last year of $225m to $285m.
