Samsung Plans Pep Rally, Gifts as AST Joins Family
Beleaguered computer maker AST Research Inc. officially folded into the Samsung Electronics Co. family on Monday. One of the South Korean firm’s first moves is to boost morale among its new employees with gifts and a companywide pep rally.
On Friday, Samsung will give the entire AST staff its choice of a free color TV, microwave or VCR. AST has 3,100 employees worldwide.
“They wanted to give us a mini-refrigerator for our desks, but people didn’t react too well to that,” one AST official said. “What would have been next? Cots for Christmas?”
That afternoon, AST’s 600 Orange County-based workers will gather on AST’s Irvine campus and “talk about the exciting future,” said AST’s president and chief executive officer, S.T. Kim.
Kim said Monday that no layoffs are planned, and the AST brand name will be preserved everywhere except Korea and Japan.
Buzz over the corporate fanfare came at the same time AST announced plans to roll out a new line of hardware products next month. The company expects to launch a series of newly designed desktop PCs and portable laptops, but it remained vague about the products’ specifics.
“We plan to expand into the small and medium-sized business market,” Kim said Monday. He added that Samsung hopes to make AST profitable by 1999, and become one of the world’s top five computer makers by 2005.
Samsung paid $5.40 per share for the 31 million shares of AST stock it did not already own. The $170-million deal--in addition to the $382 million in AST debt--turns the publicly traded Irvine company into a privately held unit of Samsung.
Experts had mixed opinions about Samsung’s prospects for ending the long market-share slide at AST, which has reported continual losses since its fourth fiscal quarter in 1994.
“The reality is Samsung has been pouring millions into AST, they’ve had a good deal of influence on the company. And yet AST is still slipping,” said Kevin Hause, a Mountain View-based PC analyst for International Data Corp.
