Harris Corp is to invest $100m in its Malaysian operations over the next five years, adding new electronic equipment, processes and technology through its Harris Advanced Technology (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd.
The El Segundo, California-based Computer People Inc US subsidiary of London-based Computer People Group Plc has acquired the Los Angeles contract programming business of Automated Concepts Inc for up to $2m in cash after earn-outs.
The story that Hewlett-Packard Co is looking seriously at acquiring Sequent Computer Systems Inc, which we noted last week, surfaced in Computer Reseller News this week, prompting Sequent to say it isn’t in talks to sell itself and isn’t aware of any attempt to acquire it.
Reliance Industries Ltd is to form a joint venture with Nynex Corp to bid for operating licences for basic and cellular telephone services in India; Nynex will have only 20% but the management will be shared.
Hewlett-Packard Co says it has formed a financial services business unit to design, build, provide consulting for and integrate computer products and services for the global financial services market.
NEC Corp, supplying Samsung Electronics Co with dynamic RAMs for packaging and sale under its own name, will buy 100,000 of Samsung’s 4M-bit parts a month in Japan from April for sale under the NEC name.
Shares in De La Rue Plc plummetted in London yesterday, down 103 pence at 929 pence, after the company said it expected only modest growth in its 1995-96 headline earnings per share; it also said it is putting up for sale the non-security paper-making businesses and assets of its Portals Plc acquisition.
The Amadeus European airline reservation system is reportedly to buy the SystemOne system in the US.
GTE Corp has retained AT&T Corp’s AT&T Network Systems as prime contractor and systems integrator to build its video dial-tone networks, using General Instrument Corp’s next-generation television set-top boxes: the multi-year contract is valued at about $200m for the first phase of construction; as reported, AT&T Network Systems won, and then was recently stripped of, a similar contract from Bell Atlantic Corp.
The US Internal Revenue Service is going to have a wonderful time with misfiled returns this year: Intuit Inc has now confirmed a user’s report that a bug in Quicken incorrectly calculates capital gains on some short-sell stock transactions.
There is bipartisan US Congressional support for a move in the House Ways & Means Committee to secure more favourable tax treatment of capital investments for the US semiconductor industry: the proposal, which set chip shares dancing, would would establish a three-year write-off period for capital investments made by semiconductor manufacturers and the tool companies that supply the industry – such investment is now written off over five years, which doesn’t reflect the rapid rate of change.
Under the agreement between Chipcom Corp, Ericsson Business Networks AB and IBM Corp (CI No 2,617), the trio plans to combine its relevant local network hub and PABX products to create a unified network infrastructure supporting speech, video and data: the first co-operative product will combine Asynchronous Transfer Mode and ISDN for personal conferencing and is due next year: Ericsson will provide isochronous Ethernet desktop links to ISDN and Asynchronous Mode networks and IBM its Person-to-Person desktop conferencing software, based on the IBM Lakes Collaborative Networking Architecture, and Chipcom, hubs.
Deutsche Telekom AG says it has 930,000 users on its D-1 digital cellular network, moving it ahead of its private-sector competitor Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH, which has 915,000 subscribers, Lothar Honsel, chief executive of the Telekom subsidiary, told Reuters: the two are cutting their rates as of May 1 in an effort to boost demand and attract more private customers – some per-minute rates are being reduced by nearly 40%.
AT&T Corp says it is building a $2.5m
research and development centre in Singapore to support its Asia-Pacific region distributors: it has four such bases planned all told, the other three being here in the UK, in the US and in Hungary.
Craig McCaw dropped out of the bidding for US Personal Computer Services licences, leaving observers to wonder why he had been bidding so high in the first place, and speculating that he might have been upping the ante to stop AT&T Corp rivals getting licences too cheaply.
The Japanese company will no doubt be fuming that whoever it was at IBM Corp that perpetrated the line it includes support for Cannon Bubble Jet printers in the latest OS/2 Warp release should be fired.
