Digital Equipment Corp is facing a six- to seven-month delay shipping products based around the 200MHz Alpha processor to customers in most of Eastern Europe due to CoCom restrictions, Alex Mittag-Lankheym, sales and marketing manager of the firm’s Czech subsidiary says. Units based around the 150MHz processor fall into a separate CoCom category where licensing applications are taking between one and two months to process. Mr Mittag-Lenkheym reported that DEC was lobbying for a change to CoCom regulations both locally and in the US, and echoed calls made by the managing director of ICL Plc’s Czech subsidiary, David Beesley, for the firms to receive licences, rather than end-users, with some form of industry self-policing – at least in regard to the lower-end restricted products. Mittag-Lenkheym said that Digital Equipment sro has so far received orders for 50 machines, but noted that two-thirds of these were currently still awaiting export licences. He argued that the restrictions often amounted to a financial loss incurred by western European governments, as many public sector computer projects are being sponsored by grants from the European Community PHARE programme. Mittag-Lenkheym also added to recent criticism of current government procurement practices, warning that suppliers should not be teased by the publication of tenders for projects that turned out to have no funding, and argued that he would like the application of the Austrian model for public sector computer procurement to be applied locally. DEC last year posted revenues of $37m in the Czech and Slovak Republics combined, making it DEC’s fastest-growing subsidiary according to local executives. The revenues compares with $30m in Hungary and an estimated $6m in Poland. About half of Czech and Slovak business comprised direct sales to public sector accounts, according to Mittag-Lenkheym. Customers include the President’s Office, the Slovak Health Insurance Company, the Czech coupon privatisation administration, PVT, and accounts in the defence sector.
