Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG says it expects its personal computer operations to show a profit in the year ending September 30: president Walter Rssler told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung that in personal computers alone, Siemens Nixdorf would return to profit in January – shipments for the quarter to December 31 were well above expectations at 134,000 units, and sales grew 50% to 60%; deliveries for the full year should grow 44% to 560,000, and sector turnover is expected to rise 22% to $1,450.
Santa Ana, California-based Extreme Technologies Inc says its Portacom International Ltd subsidiary is to establish a joint venture to create a a fully integrated wireless telephone company for Ho Chi Minh City and the major cities, outlying districts and rural villages in South Vietnam: as well as a modern cellular phone system, the venture will establish an international switching and satellite uplink centre for long distance calling between Vietnam and the US, and retail phone centre stores and central long distance telephone centres from which people without phones will be able to make calls; others in the consortium are Trans Pacific Telecommunications Management, a private interconnect firm that provides long distance services; CMC Internati onal, an electronics manufacturer in Hanoi; and Hoafa International, a telecommunications consultancy that has offices in Ho Chi Minh City.
Artisoft Inc has now completed the sale of its Eagle Technology business to Microdyne Corp, Alexandria, Virginia for about $17.5m: Eagle, which had sales of some $53m during the past 12 months, will become part of Microdyne’s networking products division; Microdyne paid $7.5m for business and technology rights and the balance of the purchase price was for assets, principally inventory; payment is in cash and letters of credit, with an initial payment of $12m at closing.
Modatech Systems Inc, Vancouver has sold its 14 MS-DOS- and Unix-based customised sales force automation installations to Broomall, Pennsylvania-based Fastech Inc for $540,000, and all Modatech employees currently working for the unit were offered pos itions by Fastech; Modatech wants to develop a more generic Windows product that can be used to automate sale forces, based on the Maximizer relational database and aimed at companies whose selling environment is focused on business-to-business transactions.
Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems Ltd will supply the UK Lord Chancellor’s office with personal computers, peripherals, training, cabling and support in a three-year contract that is worth ú12m: Siemens Nixdorf already supplies the judiciary with colour notebooks. – o – Apple Computer Inc is expanding its Indian operations and hopes to be doing $100m a year in sales within five years, Reuter reports: the company says it already has a good market in India, but it is a grey one, supplied from Hong Kong, but it wants to take its destiny into its own hands, pitching to the publishing and graphics, multimedia and education markets; an AppleSoft programme will seek alliances with Indian software developers to create applications for Macintosh users worldwide, and the company plans to establish a centre to deliver technologies and tools to develop hardware, and a programme to provide development tools; a software support program will make possible use of several Indian languages on Macintosh computers.
Jacques Payer, president and chief executive of Met-Commutation, the telephone exchange joint venture between Matra-Hachette SA, 49.99%, and L M Ericsson Telefon AB, 50.01%, said last week that he expects new bidding procedures for switching equipment in France to give his company a boost in its competition with Alcatel NV: up to now, switching orders from France Telecom were not put out to open tender, but based on cosy supply contracts with local manufacturers, notably Alcatel; as a result, today Met supplies only 15% of France Telecom’s main switches, while Alcatel holds the rest; a France Telecom spokesman would neither confirm nor
deny the figure, saying only that they are his figures, not ours; Payer hopes to win 50% to 60% of the bid to supply France Telecom’s switches for the next two years, saying Met is positioned as the true challenger to Alcatel; marketing Ericsson’s AXE 10 exchange, Met-Commutation reported revenues last year up 7% at $275m.
Prologos SA, a Paris-based company in which Dassault SA and Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA are shareholders, says it may install a CT2-type mobile telephone network in the Bordeaux urban area this autumn: Les Echos quotes Jean-Pierre Souviron, president and chief executive saying the company expects to create a subsidiary soon that would be held 20% by local enterprises; it looks to rival France Telecom’s CT2 service, BiBop, with lower prices by using transmitters from Com’1, which are said to be much cheaper than those currently on the market; if it succeeds in Bordeaux, Prologos would attempt to install service in other regions of France and abroad; France Telecom’s BiBop had an enormous early success, winning 10,000 subscribers within the first month, but now seems to have stagnated as the operator is now offering the first six months fee-free.
Inveterate buyer-in of technology it does not want to develop, Ottawa-based Corel Corp, which has already licensed WordStar, has licensed Windows database software from Alpha Software Corp on a perpetual non-exclusive basis: the Alpha Five database will be used in its planned Windows95 office suite.
Electronic money may be becoming an increasing reality but those companies that make money from processing old fashioned cheques can still hit the jackpot as Electronic Data Systems Corp has shown with what is described as the largest deal of its kind ever in Europe: EDS will spend ú30m setting up two cheque processing centres in Livingston, West Lothian and Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire that will be able to handle 300m items a year for the Royal Bank of Scotland; the contract is for 10 years; the Royal Bank is the first major British bank to contract out its cheque processing, but the activity is becoming more costly as debit cards begin to cut use of cheques.
Prosecuting magistrate Jean-Marie d’Huy has been authorised to investigate yet further the affair involving improvements made to the homes of Alcatel-Alsthom SA president Pierre Suard, who has already been interrogated about his knowledge of Alcatel CIT’s overbilling of France Telecom for transmission equipment, according to Les Echos.
Informix France SA says it has broken the Unix supplier monopoly that existed at France Telecom, with a deal to supply Informix On-Line, version 5, and ESQL/C for a database for future applications: it says the products are already being used in two applications, Automated Call History Calculation and Local Need Forecast Adjustment.
The European wing of Continuum Co has signed a licence, service and maintenance agreement with the National Australia Group (UK) Ltd bank worth ú1.5m over the next year: the licence is for Capsil, Continuum’s IBM Corp mainframe-based life and pensions administration software.
BellSouth Corp’s BellSouth Telecommunications Inc reports that it has won approval from the US Federal Communications Commission to offer access service for a new family of 500-number services: the new service type enables customers to route their calls anywhere they go, and BellSouth claims to be among the first local telephone companies in the US to offer 500 Access to long distance and wireless providers.
Cap Gemini Sogeti SA’s Hoskyns Group Plc will maintain and develop information systems for Zeneca Agrochemicals in Europe in a three-year applications management agreement worth ú12m that renews and extends an agreement signed in 1985.
Exide Electronics Group Inc, Raleigh, North Carolina has signed IBM Corp to distribute its uninterruptible power systems worldwide via its RS/6000 plant in Austin, Texas: Exide will provide IBM with Powerware RISCSaver supplies for stand-alone and networ
ked RS/6000 configurations, Powerware Prestige supplies for rackmount applications and customised OnliNet power management software with monitoring and shutdown capabilities, so that resellers can buy their systems bundled.
The Spanish competition tribunal has fined Telefonica de Espana SA $950,000 for refusing to provide telephone lines to a competitor, 3C Communications de Espana SA, which uses credit and debit cards and was denied the opportunity to operate in one of the few telecommunications markets open to competition.
DeTeMobil GmbH, the cellular unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, says its supervisory board has approved plans for the group to take an 11% stake in Inmarsat-P for some $67m.
US multinational companies can take advantage of the peso crisis in Mexico by increasing procurement of materials there to offset the impact of falling sales, Hewlett-Packard Co chairman Lew Platt said at the opening of the company’s new printer plant in Barcelona on Friday; with the opening of the new plant in Sant Cugat in Barcelona, Hewlett-Packard will have invested some $114m there since starting operations in 1985 – the $15.4m worldwide research and development, design, production and marketing centre for HP DesignJet printers has global responsibility for that printer line, and responsibility for European production and distribution of the HP DeskJet printer; 98% of production is exported with 56% going to other European countries, 26% to the US, 18% to Asia.
Intel Corp has reduced its stake in VLSI Technology Inc to 17% from 21%, but it may decide to retain part of the stake as an investment.
Tandy Corp reports that January sales from stores open 12 months ago rose 6%; sales from all stores were up 33% in January to $394.7m.
US West Inc signed a definitive agreement to trade its San Diego cellular licence to GTE Corp in exchange for some GTE cellular assets in Oregon, Washington, Minnesota and New Mexico: US West’s franchise covers 2.6m potential customers GTE’s cover 3.2m people.
The regulatory hurdles to be cleared before Deutsche Telekom AG and France Telecom complete their deal to take a joint 20% stake in Sprint Corp look insuperable under current regulations – but there still isn’t even a definitive deal yet: Sprint chairman William Esrey hopes to have an agreement in place by early next quarter but expresses disappointment that it is moving slower than we hoped for; a new stumbling block is that the outline agreement calls for the European partners to pay $47.225 a share for the first tranche, and $51 a share for the second, yet Sprint shares have now slumped to $29.0625; There are a lot of things in the definitive agreement that we’re trying to nail down, Esrey declared, but declined to be more specific about t hem.
Network Computing Devices Inc says it has licensed various of its communications software products to a major telecommunications provider under an agreement that guarantees it at least $15m over the next several years subject to completion of the products and their acceptance by the telecommunications provider.
New Brighton, Minnesota-based Dotronix Inc reports a $2.6m order from a system integrator for video wall displays over the next year.
Louisville, Kentucky-bsaed Dataguard Recovery Services Inc has bought some operating assets of Societe Twinsys SA, a French disaster back-up services provider, which should more than double 1995 revenues; the assets include contracts with European customers expected to generate about $6m in 1995; Twinsys provides services for users of Compagnie des Machines Bull SA and Unix computers and has operated under the administration of an insolvency tribunal since November.
Telefonica de Peru SA, the newly formed merger between CPT and Entel Peru, is to invest $1,900m in facilities over the next four years.
A lawsuit filed against Novell Inc by Lantec Inc is without merit and Novell will defend itself vigorously, the Provo company said: the suit allege
s that the acquisition of Wordperfect Corp was anti-competitive because Novell was now favouring NetWare applications from Wordperfect where it had planned to encourage similar products being developed by Lantec; Novell says the core of the issue is simply that Lantec owes it $5m all told.
The video-on-demand agreement between Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc (CI No 2,595) is an end-to-end one, and Silicon Graphics will supply its server, its visually intuitive viewer interface, interactive applications and a powerful set-top box using the MIPS microprocessor.
Five US wireless contenders bid about $261.8m for rights to offer new wireless telephone services in the 63rd round of licence auctions by the US Federal Communications Commission: the auction has brought in total bids so far since its inception on December 5 of $4,497m and will draw to a close this week.
Computer Sciences Corp has won a monster $100m four-year facilities management contract with the 136-store BhS chain of Storehouse Plc; under the new contract, the US firm for will act as a systems integrator, implementing the recommendations made by CSC-Index to help BhS raise profits and cut the time it takes to get products to customers; under the original $200m 11-year agreement in 1993, Computer Sciences acquired the Luton data centre.
AT&T Corp and GTE Corp have decided not to proceed with their previously-announced interactive video trial in Manassas, Virginia because rapid technological advances made it no longer necessary: AT&T has decided to focus instead on the delivery of full commercial systems.
Digital Equipment Corp and North York, Ontario-based Leitch Technology Corp have signed an agreement to develop and supply a high quality broadcast digital video and audio expansion boards for computer-based broadcasting equipment, in Leitch’s first move to supply video to network boards for the sector.
The Comprehensive High Availability Requirements Technology Study is available from Dennis, Massachusetts researcher Standish Group International Inc for $30,000 (CI No 2,594): the researcher says the 250-page study into the relative costs of fault-tolerant and fault-resilient systems was commissioned by seven US vendors and users that it will not identify, and that nothing should be read into the fact that Stratus Computer Inc was the only company named in the release.
The things are banned in US schools – but there, the reason is that if the kids are involved in dealing in drugs, they shouldn’t do it in school time and on school property: Southgate School in North London has had to ban the use by pupils of cellular telephones for the much more innocent reason that students in class had started calling their friends in other classrooms, and receiving outside calls in class.
