Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, one of a tiny handful of companies worldwide making the kind of super-high-speed laser printers used for heavy duty applications such as printing out thousands of bank statements in a day, is abandoning the business, saying that it does not fit with its other activities. It will sell it to Dutch office automation equipment company Oce- van der Grinten NV. When IBM Corp launched its 21,000 lines per minute 3800 printer, Siemens was the only company able to keep up with it: by using a prism to split its laser beam into five separate beams, it was able to match the IBM output speed at lower cost, and with simpler technology. IBM has since abandoned its printers and now buys the engines from Hitachi Ltd. As well as selling the printers to its own mainframe customers, it offered them OEM, but the only customers it could name yesterday were the two that are widely known, ICL Plc and Storage Technology Corp. Oce-van der Grinten is paying about $552m for the business, and will finance it with a rights issue to its shareholders. The deal will create a company with more than 15,000 employees worldwide and total sales of near $2,450m.The share issue represents 20% of the total out, that is 16.7% of the enlarged equity.The Nixdorf unit employs around 2,900 and had sales last year in the region of $600m.
