Dan Stets' April 21 article on auction outcome ========================================================================== GERMANS BID, AND LAND A BARGAIN: ARTICLE SUMMARY ========================================================================== [Dan Stets, the Philadelphia Inquirer journalist on hand for the auction, put out an article on the outcome this morning. This is the point-by-point summary by Bill Zimmer. -Jason] "Germans bid, and land a bargain" Escom AG submitted a winning bid of $6.6 million for Commodore's assets. A judge, however, still must approve it. By Dan Stets Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer a. Escom purchased Commodore's assets for $6.6 million yesterday during the auction. b. A half-dozen or so companies were at the auction but only Escom and Dell Computer Company submitted bids backed by the required $1 million security deposit. c. Dell attached some unspecified conditions to there bid and consequently it was disqualified. d. Escom will resume manufacturing the Amiga and other Commodore products and begin to make Apple-compatible and IBM-compatible clones with the Commodore name on them. The manufacturing will be in a plant near Beijing, China. e. Escom will attempt to produce a Commodore PowerPC. This will be manufactured in Europe. f. Escom has no plans to resume any of Commodore's American manufacturing operations. g. Both the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York City and the Supreme Court of the Bahamas must still approve the sale. h. Both IBM and the trustee for Commodore's assets in the Netherlands, UK, and the Philippines are objecting to the sale. i. A hearing will be held today, Friday, April 21, in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to consider the proposed sale to Escom and the objections of the above (h) creditors. j. Since Commodore's creditors are owed more than $100 million and previous estimates of Commodore's auction value were put as high as $20 million, the creditors may have reservations about the low sale price generated by the auction. k. A standing-room-only crowd of 65 attended the auction. Two creditors, Prudential Insurance and Microsoft were in attendance. Representatives from two Chinese electronics companies, New Star and Tietsin Trust & Investment Company also were in attendance. l. Escom plans a joint venture with Tietsin to manufacture Commodore's products. m. Also at the auction were representatives of Computer Connection of Stockton, California. They submitted a bid but did not include the required $1 million deposit. There bid was, therefore, disqualified. n. CEI apparently teamed up with Dell in its unsuccessful bid. o. The Commodore UK management buyout team withdrew before the bidding began. p. Dell's representative at the auction, Mr. Dalton Kaye, stated that his company had not yet given up its attempt to purchase Commodore. He further stated that he was not aware until two (2) weeks ago about the auction and had insufficient time to evaluate either the bid documents or Commodore's assets. In its latest fiscal year (which ended in January), Dell's sales rose 21 percent to $3.5 billion and profits rose to $149 million. q. The amount of Dell's bid and the amount of the bid made by Computer connection were not made public. The conditions which Dell attached to their bid were also not made public. -- Bill Zimmer - zim@ibx.com Moderator, comp.binaries/sources.amiga [Contents] HTML Conversion by AG2HTML.pl V2.950424, perl $RCSfile: perl.c,v $$Revision: 4.0.1.8 $$Date: 1993/02/ 05 19:39:30 $ Patch level: 36 & witbrock@cs.cmu.edu