Despite the disconcerting message from Germany’s Kartelamt (CI No 2,666 ), the European Commission is clearly anxious not to reject the proposed Atlas joint venture of Deutsche Telekom AG and France Telecom, and Competition Commissioner Karel Van Miert said yesterday that while it will warn the two that it has serious problems with Atlas joint venture, it will not amount to a death sentence on the project, and his spokesman denied that the Commission had been influenced by the Cartel Office; a final decision on the venture will be taken by a majority vote of the full Commission; objectors to the deal include British Telecommunications Plc and the association of German telecommunication users; the Commission is leaning towards a view that the deal may be acceptable if Germany and France move up their liberalisation timetables; Van Miert has said he fears the Atlas venture is aimed at closing the French and German markets to competition, but he could change his mind if the whole deal proved to be a global and strategic one.
Bertelsmann AG and America Online Inc have now formed the first of their three planned European companies under their European on-line services venture: the new company is Bertelsmann Online GmbH & Co KG, headquartered for now in Hamburg; formation of companies in the UK and France is next on the agenda.
Computer Associates International Inc has still not come off the high engendered by its surging figures and decided to trumpet them again yesterday: it says that even its mainframe software business grew 14% to 15% in the fourth quarter and 11% on the year, while in the mid-range client-server sector, revenues rose 156% for the year so that the return on equity jumped to about 45% in the 1995 year, from 36% in fiscal 1994 and 25% in 1993; needless to say, the star performer was CA-Unicenter, which recorded $300m of business in the year, up from under $100m the previous one.
Cray Research Inc, with 1.5m under its belt, is to buy back up to 1m more common shares or convertibles.
MFS Communications Co Inc of Omaha, Nebraska now wants to build one of its Metropolitan Area Networks in and has applied to the Georgia Public Service Commission for a certificate allowing it to be the first entity to provide the full range of competitive telephone exchange services in BellSouth Corp territory.
NEC Corp is investing $150m to add a second thin-film transistor liquid crystal diode flat-panel manufacturing line at its Akita plant to double monthly capacity to 100,000 panels a month in an effort to wrest market leadership from Sharp Corp: the new line will make 10.4 displays; it has a second plant in Kagoshima, which is already doing 100,000 panels a month.
Unisys Corp has parted company with the co-presidents of its Worldwide Information Service unit, James Corey and Edward Sanderson: the two replaced Victor Millar in the president’s role after Millar resigned in February; Millar left Unisys to form a similar unit for AT&T Corp; Unisys named executive vice-president Stephen Carns as acting president of the unit, and said that O’Leary said Corey and Sanderson were unable to make the long-term commitment to completing the mission of fully developing the unit.
Malaysian conglomerate Sime Darby Bhd has taken 70% of a joint venture company with AirTouch Communications Inc to offer telecommunications services in Malaysia: the joint venture will offer services off Loral Corp’s Globalstar System, based on a constellation of 48 low-earth-orbit satellites; Sime Darby will provide general and financial management expertise for the joint venture while AirTouch, with the other 30%, will commit its technical and marketing expertise to it.
Cray Research Inc has tapped Phillip Samper to be its new chairman and chief executive: Samper is a former vice-chairman of Eastman Kodak Co and president of Sun Microsystems Inc, where he is credited with having successfully steered the company out of a very rocky patch three or four years ago; he succeeds John Ca
rlson, who resigned as chief executive because he was dissatisfied with Cray’s performance under his stewardship and then resigned as chairman last month.
The Den Bosch, Netherlands-based personal computer manufacturer Tulip Computers NV says it sees no immediate cause to adjust its 1995 profit forecast although its market share has dropped in recent months – according to Dataquest Inc, Tulip’s share of the domestic personal computer market fell to 6.7% from 9.8% late last year; Tulip says most growth is currently coming in home computers, where it has just launched its Impressive Line.
Louis Gerstner has triumphantly won back the hearts and minds on Wall Street, but he has not even begun to win over the poor bloody infantry within the company, and evidence of poor morale and disaffection, particularly in the US work force, where many employees feel they are required to do the work that used to be done by three people, is legion: in what looks a decidedly spiteful and insensitive decision, the company is to cut salaries of senior executive secretaries, some by as much as 36%, on grounds either than the senior executive that justified a high salary for his or her secretary has already been re-engineered out of the company, or because their salaries are out of line with those of secretaries in other companies.
Roseland, New Jersey-based Automatic Data Processing Inc is pioneering the use of CD-ROMs in place of the volumninous printouts that have to be sent to companies whose payrolls it processes: its Autopay Document Management System will deliver employer information generated during each payroll cycle on CD-ROM, instead of hundreds of pages of paper for a 2,000-employee firm; the disk runs under Windows and includes Adobe Systems Inc’s Acrobat viewer, which provides the read, search, print and facsimile utilities for use with the system; the disk will be delivered with a client’s payroll cheques, just as the paper report was in the past – that comes as a bit of a surprise because most British companies abandoned payroll cheques for direct bank-to-bank payments years ago.
Peter Sprague, who recruited Charlie Sporck to the top job at the company, has resigned as chairman and from the board of National Semiconductor Corp after 19 years because he wants to devote his energies to his role as founder and chairman of Wave Systems Corp: the company says it is now seeking a successor for the chairman’s post.
Great idea, Marv, but some people – even some men – still do like to alter their superficial image by wearing differently styled and coloured jackets according to mood and whim: artificial genius (we were castigated the first time we used that one, but it is simply shorthand for genius working in the field of artificial intelligence) Marvin Minsky, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is reportedly playing around with ideas for a sports jacket that would adjust its thermal properties to different climates, obviating the need for a wardrobe full of different weight jackets for the changing seasons – Wouldn’t it make more sense, he enquires, to have one $1,000 coat than 10 $100 conventional coats?
