New Olivetti UK meets Monday to plan future

"There's a company meeting on Monday but I don't expect anything startling," said Paul Evans, product marketing manager. "It will be nice to move ahead and concentrate 100 per cent on business rather than 99 per cent. It will be good to reassure customers who were asking questions about our future." Evans added that he was expecting to meet PC company global managing director Bernard Auer tonight to discuss sales strategies.

Despite the long-running sell-off soap opera, Evans claims that the one-time Italian giant has been making giant strides in the UK: "We've just delivered our latest numbers to [market researcher] DataQuest and they show 430 per cent unit growth in notebooks and over 50 per cent overall." Olivetti UK last year introduced a two-tier distribution model that saw it selling indirect to the channel for the first time. Evans said he expects no change to that policy resulting from Monday's meeting.