Five years ago: Olivetti UK says show must go on

"It's business as usual," said Paul Evans, product marketing manager for the division in the UK. "From the PC company perspective it's not who owns our shares that's important."

"We're in the midst of a big roll-out of notebooks and servers. The name Olivetti will continue for a long time. The internal staff have known for some time that we were looking for somebody to invest. In the PC industry it happens all the time."

Evans said the UK hadn't been hurt by the growing speculation over the company's future. "The speculation doesn't help obviously but in terms of the business moving forward we're growing faster than the market. In the first six months of 1996 compared to the first six months of 1995 we were up 211 per cent. We've had e-mail from customers who have read Dataquest saying how well we're doing."

Evans said more new products would be announced over the next fortnight.