CompuServe Messages

Speech by Petro Tyschtschenko We are pleased to be here in the UK, one of our most important markets, to have the opportunity to talk directly to the Amiga press. We will talk to our dealers and the developers tomorrow. We know that this press meeting should have taken place earlier. Please understand that we were very busy. We have set up the operations and the material for production. During this time, we have achieved many things. Let's talk about this now. Some of you surely know how long and difficult the takeover of Commodore was and how much this one year of latency hurt the Amiga market. Building up everything again was also a difficult task for us. Especially the financial and logistic situation. Without the support from our mothercompany ESCOM AG, nothing would have been possible. We actually revived the Amiga in two important steps: First by acquiring the assets of the former Commodore for more than 10 million Dollars secondly by starting it up again, which requested again several times the initial investment. Other main difficulties we encountered were to get specific parts and components for production. D-RAMs are on allocation, Amiga keyboards, floppies and SCSI harddrives have long lead times. Tailor made parts are difficult to get and they cost more than in the old Commodore times. Our first objective was to get Amiga products back on the market as fast as possible. To achieve this goal in an acceptable time, we decided to build the A1200 and A4000T without modifications. We have however included the new version 3.1 of the Operating System for the A1200. Ladies and Gentlemen, please be aware that the A4000T allready is a complete new product. There have only been produced 200 units worldwide by former Commodore. There will not be modifications on the casing for this year. The design proposals that were presented in Frankfurt are only a possibility for the models coming later. Please be aware : If we had decided to make enhancements immediately, there wouldn't have been machines on the market for the Christmas season. This decision does not mean in any way that we are going to stop research and development. Enhancements will be made on current machines for sure. I'll talk about this again later. But now I would like to present you the actual status of our operations. We are a german company located in Bensheim, 30 miles south of Frankfurt. Our production, assembling and material providers are located in Europe but the world is our market. Our team has grown tremendously to reach 39 people since May 31st, with the new addition of Virtual Products. We are a flexible, agressive, motivated, transparent and dynamic team. We can react very quickly to new situations, we take our strategic decisions faster than the competition does. What is our team doing on distribution ? Distribution John Smith already told you about the UK distribution. One piece of information you will surely be interested in is that ESCOM shops will carry Amiga Computers in the United Kingdom. The employees in these shops used to sell Amigas and we want to use their store traffic again. This will be an excellent additional sales tool to spread Amigas in the UK. We will also support the Amiga dealers who have the best knowledge of the platform and who can provide excellent service to customers. Distribution outside the UK. The Sino market, which includes mainland China, Hong-Kong, Macao and Tawan is covered by our chinese joint-venture. In North America, we already have installed a dealer network but are still looking for a potential distributor. Somebody who is willing to support and invest in our product. We are actually looking for a partner more than just a distributor. Production GOOD NEWS : We are still on schedule to produce Amigas for availability in September. And even better news, we will have a real european manufactured product. The Amiga 1200 will be produced in Bordeaux, France. Our successful negotiations with Solectron, one of the world leader of sub-contract manufacturing, guarantees a european high quality standard. Quality is very important for us, we want to reduce defective returns to a minimum. That's why we focused on Europe rather than far-east. The Amiga 4000T motherboards will be produced in the United States, near Philadelphia. The units for Europe will then be assembled in the ESCOM facilities in Germany. The american units will be assembled in Philadelphia. We have made an agreement with a european monitor manufacturer. He will provide a monitor especially adapted to be used with the Amiga. The monitor is a high-quality multisync monitor that can scan horizontal frequencies from 15 to 38 KiloHertz. The plug of that monitor is also adapted to the video output connector of the A1200 and A4000T. I think this is exactly what is needed for all Amiga resolutions. As announced at our previous press conference, our plan is still to build 100 K A1200's and 20 K A4000T's until the end of this year. These figures are based on existing orders and on customer based forecasts. I'm quite sure that this gives us the assurance that the whole production will actually be sold. A large percentage of our A1200 production will be sold alone in the UK. Servicing The repair and spare servicing will be centralized in our service-centre in Braunschweig, Germany, in coordination with the representation points in each country. The technical dealer support will also be handled here, as well as the distribution for computers and monitors in Germany. Our service plan is very simple : we don't repair, we only make components exchanges. Future plans, developments As I promised before, I will now tell you about our future plans for research & development. First, we plan to enhance current models. We are thinking of faster processors and chip integration for the beginning. We are going to integrate the 68060 chip for the A4000T this year. For the entry-level model, we are looking at an external CD ROM addition and more RAM onboard the bare units. We are also planning to use the CD 32 concept for developments of set-top-box systems. The set-top-boxes will open new markets for Amiga products. Set-top-Boxes could be produced in variants for cable-TV, satellite-TV and for telephone line communication and also be used for home-shopping and home-banking. I'm convinced that this market is tremendous and will push the Amiga technology into millions of households. Software publishers should be interested in writing software for such a widely spread platform. The Amiga architecture is optimaly suited for set-top-systems because of its low demand for ressources like RAM or processor power and because of its multitasking and realtime abilities, in summmary, the Amiga is the most cost effective platform for set-top-boxes. It is still under investigation which RISC platform will be used as basis for the Amiga of the future. At this point, we cannot say more about this issue, thank you for your understanding. IFA Berlin From the 26th of August to the 3rd of September, we will be present at the IFA, one of the biggest consumer fairs in Germany for TV, communications and multimedia. 500 000 visitors are expected this year and we use the occasion to make our comeback with the Amiga in Europe. Virtual Products I-Glasses and Commodore will also be presented to our visitors. May I point out that the Amiga version of the I-Glasses will be much cheaper than the PC version because it doesn't require the VGA-to-composite conversion box, since the Amiga 1200 already has a composite output. Ladies an gentleman, I hope this event was informative and I hope inspiring for you. We are now at your disposition if there are any questions you would like to ask us. Thank You for your attention. —Betty