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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (28137)	1/15/1998 3:46:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Xircom says Asia growing again...................................... biz.yahoo.com Thursday January 15, 3:25 am Eastern Time INTERVIEW-Xircom sees Asia growth resuming By Josephine Ng SINGAPORE, Jan 15 (Reuters) - U.S.-based personal computer card products maker Xircom Inc expects its sales growth in the Asia Pacific region to pick up again in 1998 after a flat last quarter of 1997, a senior company official said on Thursday. Dirk Gates, Xircom's president and chief executive officer, told Reuters in an interview that the Asia Pacific had been the company's fastest growth area until the region's financial crisis slowed demand for its products in late 1997. ''We saw virtually flat sales (in Asia Pacific) due to various currency issues, mainly people holding off some purchases,'' Gates said, referring to quarter-to-quarter growth. But he was confident sales in the region would pick up this quarter. ''We are hopeful we will get single digit growth in the region for this year,'' he said, adding that it was likely to be just under 10 percent quarter to quarter. ''In Asia Pacific, sales for fiscal 1998 should be about US$40-50 million, about 20 percent growth over 1997,'' he added. For its fiscal year ended September 30, 1997, Xircom's sales in the region rose 10 percent to US$31 million, Danny Tan, Asia Pacific director of sales and marketing said. The region contributed 17 percent to its worldwide revenues of US$185 million in fiscal 1997. Overall, Gates said the company would return to the black for the quarter ended December 1997. He said he was comfortable with analyst projection of earnings per share of US$0.09-0.10 for the quarter. For fiscal 1998, Gates said he was also happy with analyst estimates of revenues of about US$260 million. The company recorded a loss of US$12.8 million or operating share loss of US$0.57 in the three months ended September 30, 1997 due mainly to a shift to a faster manufacturing and distribution model. Xircom, which makes products that connect notebooks to networks, was likely to concentrate its manufacturing in Malaysia in the next few years, Gates said. He said another US$17 million would be invested in the plant in Penang this year. The plant started operations in 1995 and Xircom had invested US$10 million in the last two years, Gates said. The new expenditure would help to triple capacity in the next three to five years from the current one to two million PC cards produced every quarter, Gates said. Gates said the company's performance was driven by growth in notebook computers. He said as the technology gap between desktops and notebooks had disappeared and with the price difference shrinking, portable computers would become the main choice of businesses and individuals for productivity reasons. The industry in which Xircom was in was also consolidating where he envisaged 3Com (Nasdaq:COMS - news) and itself to be the two dominant players, he said. Currently, 3Com had a worldwide market share of over 40 percent and Xircom slightly below 20 percent, he said. ''Manufacturers are opting to buy (PC) cards instead of making them so competitors are becoming our customers,'' he said. Gates said that as a result, Xircom's sales to original euqipment manufacturers had risen to 15 percent of total revenue in the quarter ended December 1997 from just one to two percent before. On the push towards simplified computers like the NetPC and network computers, Gates said: ''They are glorified dumb terminals that don't take into account the notion of mobility.''

To: Stoctrash who wrote (28137)	1/15/1998 10:01:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Cube boxes in Hong Kong........................................... nikkeibp.com Anthony Plewes, Hong Kong HK Telecom Launches Interactive TV Hongkong Telecom IMS Ltd of Hong Kong launched its interactive television (TV) service, dubbed iTV, in January 1998. The service is "a transformation of the TV concept," according to Michelle Li, manager, media communications at the company. "It transforms the multipoint broadcasting concept to a point-to-point service," she explained. According to Hongkong Telecom IMS, iTV is the first commercially available broadband interactive multimedia service available in the world. The iTV service essentially consists of three main services: video-on-demand (VOD), music-on-demand (MOD) and home shopping, which will be based around a virtual mall concept. There are also plans to extend these initial services to also include network gaming, home banking and broadband Internet access. The home banking service is slated for an April 1998 launch and Hongkong Telecom IMS has an agreement with two major banks in Hong Kong. The service will allow the users to do their banking over the network as well as make deposits and withdrawals at home using an electronic cash based smart card. The smart card can be used directly with the set-top box (see Fig) supplied with the iTV service. The rental of the set-top box is included in the subscription to the service, which will be around HK$150-200. The set-top box is manufactured by NEC Corp of Japan and includes the functionality for the demodulation and decoding of the MPEG-2 video stream. It also has functionality to prevent taping of the video stream to prevent piracy. The movies for the VOD service are all digitized in-house in Hongkong Telecom IMS's Digital Media Centre (DMC). The movies are compressed using the firm's proprietary technique, which includes the use of a human technician to optimize the process - this would involve using a less high compression ratio for sequences involving a lot of movement, for example. The average compression ratio for a whole movie is about 1:90. The DMC is primarily a fully-digitized post-production center, but it also is involved in dubbing and some production. It is the first center of its kind in Hong Kong, and the company invested some HK$120 million in it. Previously it was necessary to send movies to the US for digitization at considerable expense. The iTV service is delivered to the home using Hong Kong Telecom's existing digital telephone network. The service will utilize fibre to the building (FTTB) technology to get the MPEG-2 video stream from video servers located in three points in the territory directly into the home. An optical network unit (ONU) receives the stream from the ATM network and passes the signal along the ordinary copper wire to the set-top box in the home. The company has invested over HK$1 billion in the project and has a target of 88,000 households by the end of 1998 and 300,000 households within 2-3 years.