Wordplex Plc is long gone from the Canada Development Corp portfolio and is now a quoted company in London, but the Canadian institution, which merged Wordplex with its other word processor specialist, AES Data, for a time before realising it was a terrible mistake, now wants shot of all its office equipment companies – and that includes AES. The Toronto firm, making shared logic word processors and business systems that run under Unix, is not an overly attractive proposition because it lost the equivalent $6m in 1985 on sales of $107.5m, but two companies that might be interested are the Lanier division of Harris Corp, which sold AES machines in the US for several years, and Philips NV, which has had its eye on Lanier for some time. Also on the Canada Development block is Insystec, a start-up working on integrated speech and data communications systems in Orlando, Florida; and the big copier distributor Savin Corp, where it has a 64% shareholding. Canada Development wants to divest the companies to specialise in oil and gas.
