Iomega Corp., maker of information storage products like the Zip and Jaz drives, watched its stock lose 17 percent of its value Monday after the company warned that it will report a loss of US$10 million to $25 million in the first quarter. Iomega was down $1.625 at $7, a new low, in active trading of more than 4.3 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
"Our shipments this quarter in all regions are generally lower than we anticipated, particularly in our international aftermarket business," company President Kim Edwards said, in the latest announcement of bad news. In addition, the company predicted its revenue in the first quarter of 1998 will be "relatively flat" compared to the fourth quarter of last year. Iomega said it will report first-quarter results April 16.
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No automatic bump from Worldnet: Worldnet, the Internet service provider owned by AT&T, says it will not resort to session timers as a way of reducing problems which occur with heavy network use.
Worldnet spokesman Mike Miller said that after announcing last week that it might impose time limits to reduce network congestion, the company has decided against logging off users after a fixed period of time. Miller says the company sampled customer feedback through news groups and decided the session limits is not a solution for managing heavy usage.
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Free monitors from Compaq: Compaq Computer is planning to hand out free monitors and other accessories to businesses that buy its desktop PCs in an effort to reduce inventory at its distributors, The Wall Street Journal said on Monday.
Compaq said it will give away 15-inch monitors, valued at about $300 each, with its commercial desktop PCs. At the same time, the paper reported, it will extend a memory promotion offered to buyers of high-end servers to other units. But home consumers won't be getting any deals, since that side of the business isn't suffering an inventory backup, the paper said.
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Hasbro buys Atari: Toymaker Hasbro Inc. Monday expanded its offerings of videogames, acquiring more than 75 Atari properties - including the legendary Centipede, Missile Command, Pong, Breakout, and Tempest titles - from JTS Corp. The purchase price was not disclosed.
The toymaker's Hasbro Interactive unit said it will produce the games for use on personal computers and the Sony Playstation videogame console.
Atari gained fame for the introduction of Pong in the early 1970s and was a prominent player in the home videogame market in the 1980s with the Atari 2600 home videogame console.
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SAP does the NC: German software giant SAP plans to use this week's CeBIT trade fair in Frankfurt to highlight software designed to run on network computers. The new "front-end" program would enable large corporations to extract data from SAP's R/3 enterprise management software using NCs, according to sources familiar with the company's plans and industry reports.
The new Java-based program would help SAP's growth efforts by making it easier for customers to switch over from old mainframe-based systems to versions of R/3 that run on networks of smaller computers. "SAP still has some 1,600 customers using mainframes with dumb terminals, and it's important to do what it can to migrate them to small servers," said Johannes Ries, analyst at Commerzbank AG in Frankfurt.
Reuters contributed to this report.
