Hitachi has already announced plans to market its M-series mainframes in the US to local subsidiaries of its customers in Japan, and there are growing signs that it has decided the time has come to put the squeeze on National Semiconductor Corp and persuade it to sell its National Advanced Systems unit to Hitachi. At […]
Hitachi has already announced plans to market its M-series mainframes in the US to local subsidiaries of its customers in Japan, and there are growing signs that it has decided the time has come to put the squeeze on National Semiconductor Corp and persuade it to sell its National Advanced Systems unit to Hitachi. At a time when the chip business is booming, NatSemi is having to report very storm-damaged figures because of the difficulties it is having in its computer marketing business, and has acknowledged that it has asked Hitachi to do all it can to reduce transfer prices for its IBM-compatible CPUs and peripherals, which are increasingly difficult to sell in the US at the current ravaged yen-dollar exchange rate. Japanese companies interested in increasing market share are always ready to be accomodating on price, which suggests that Hitachi has reasons of its own for making life difficult for NatSemi – the most likely of those being that it now wants its own US sales network.
