Sir Clive Sinclair still has ambitions to head a public company, and his new strategy of setting up separate companies, each with outside finance, to nurture his brainchildren, looks a lot more secure than the original one of having everything under one roof. His vehicle remains Sinclair Research Ltd, in which institutions paid a heady UKP34 a time for shares in 1983, and are looking sadly at current trades at around the 60 pence mark. But at that price, those shares could turn out to be the bargain of the century, and Sinclair Research hopes to do something for its long-suffering backers by floating on the Unlisted Securities Market next year. The company now holds 12.7% of Cambridge Computer Ltd, a low profile company by comparison with Sir Clive’s original foray into computers, which eventually saw him having to sell his own name to Alan Sugar’s Amstrad Plc when used in connection with computers. But Cambridge has done well with its Z88 notebook-size computer, and a new hot property is expected from the company next year. More exciting still is Anamartic Ltd, which has solved the problems of wafer scale integration that stymied the American protagonists, and has persuaded such heavyweights as Fujitsu Ltd and Tandem Computers Inc that its technology is sound and viable. Anamartic launched its wafer stack solid state secondary memory device in October, and Sinclair Research still holds a 14.8% stake in the company. In between the high potential but low quality of earnings that characterises the low end of the personal computer market, and the super-high risk but enormous potential of Anamartic, lies the much lower risk Shaye Communications Ltd with its pocket phone equipment and backing from Nokia Oy, which promises good quality earnings and steady growth in a highly- regarded sector: Sinclair Research holds 9.4% of Shaye. Needless to say, those are not where Sir Clive’s fertile mind is at now: the next two poten tial hot properties that may grow into associate companies are a new microprocessor capable of emulat ing existing environments ultra-fast, and the first fundamental redesign of the bicycle for 100 years.
