Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1999/03/11/psion_dacom_restructures_business_model/

Psion Dacom restructures business model

98 was good but DSPs are detrimental

By Mike Magee

Posted in On-Prem, 11th March 1999 17:05 GMT

Gareth Hughes, MD of Psion Dacom, said today that while 1998 was an "exceptional" year for his company, the incursion of embedded solutions was eroding its business. And now the company will deliver solutions aimed at the corporate market, and move into the MiniPCI and Fast Ethernet arena. Said Hughes: "1998 was a terrific year. We increased the number of units sold to just over 800,000, which represented growth of over 150 per cent. Every year the average selling price declines by about 20 per cent so we have to sell more units just to stay still." He said: "The rapid roll-out of embedded modems will detrimentally affect our growth." Psion Dacom will not spin itself off as a separate business, said Hughes. Instead, it will concentrate on supplying its Gold Card solutions to corporations, which because of their internal policies, prefer cards to embedded solutions. Plus, most embedded modem solutions depend on implementations of the Windows operating system and large corporations do not want to be tied to just one OS. Today, Psion Dacom announced a CardBus-based Global card offering 56K modem access and 10/100 Fast Ethernet access. The Fast Ethernet continues to grow, said Hughes, citing IDC figures. Sources said Toshiba was likely to be the first of Psion Dacom's large OEM customers likely to re-brand the Gold Card. Other customers it has include IBM and Dell. ®