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Money makers

INTEL Corp has introduced a new generation of chips by launching two fast versions of its Pentium microprocessor. This is part of an aggressive marketing drive by the computer giant, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, the International Herald Tribune reports.

The company's is anxious to garner a share of the personal computer market, prodded by fierce competition from PC clone manufacturers. Intel has followed the time-tested formula of pricing its new generation chips for high profits and slashing prices dramatically on its older ones to get an edge over imitators.

NEC of Japan and Samsung Electronics of South Korea have decided to jointly manufacture 256-megabit dynamic random access memory (D-RAM) chips, which could cost up to Y 100 billion ($960 million). Samples of the new chip are likely to be available by 1998.

Both companies have carved a niche in the world chip market. Samsung is South Korea's largest manufacturer of semiconductors and ranks 7th in the world in terms of 1993 sales. NEC, the world's second largest chipmaker after the US-based Intel, dominates Japan's PC market with a market share of more than 50 per cent.

BRITISH Telecommunications (BT) has begun initial trials on an interactive video, offering interactive services on telephone lines to 70 employees before it launches a bigger trial later this year.

As a first step, BT will try to assess consumer demand for services such as home banking, home shopping and entertainment. If things work to plan, it will launch a highly capital intensive interactive network based on the storage of images in massive computers that can be used by consumers through telephones.

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