Updated 29 August 1995
For those of you who possibly do not know me I am John Smith and I have been appointed the UK Sales Manager for Amiga Technologies UK.
I was previously with Commodore for 7 years, the last 2 years of them as National Sales Manager.
You will observe from the Agenda that I will explain briefly about the product we will be selling and through which channels we will be selling them..
I am obviously biased towards the Amiga - very happy to be selling it again, and look forward to it re-emergence and it gaining the recognition it richly deserves.
However, I am fortunate in being able to sell other products along side the Amiga that come from both inside and outside the Commodore branding.
The first of these, which is outside the Commodore brand, is Virtual Reality product in the form of I-Glasses. There will be two versions available. The first we can term the video version. This type will work with anything that has a composite video output - so it will obviously work with Amiga but also Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation - your VHS video player etc.
They act as a personal display screen and display the image equivalent to that of an 80" screen in which you can be totally immersed. In fact your very own cinema! You can see your games in 2D or 3D with games that have support for I Glasses . Films like Tommy from the WHO are currently being produced especially in this 3D format.
The pack will come complete with games and be available during September .
It will include productivity software like Database -Spreadsheet- Word processing package- Paint package and games.
We will of course box it in our usual eye catching manner .
There will be the Amiga 4000/040 pack with a 1 Gigabyte hard drive and 6 megabytes of memory and later, during November a 4000/060 pack. Top quality software again will be included.
All Amigas will have the latest version of the operating system,version 3.1, which has been optimised to improve system performance..
I will also have a new Amiga multisync monitor that vertically scans from 15 to 38 Khz which will avail itself to all Amigas from A500 upwards that have an RGB port..
Whilst we still have to dot Is and cross the T's we will have 2 distributors this side of Christmas . Negotiations are almost complete. Looking to 1996 I propose one or possibly even up to two more distributors around the main Christmas period. These distributors obviously will support the full range of our products and be cognisant of the Independents requirements. A higher percentage of the product available this Christmas will go through the Independent channel. As again we maintain support for the loyalty they have shown throughout the ten years of Amiga.
It is my responsibility to sell our products here in the UK and also in Australia, India, Malta and Israel.
We have already sold the majority of our production, it is now a question of allocation and that transfers the pressure back to Petro. Please ensure we get all our product and importantly when we want it.
To summarise - Amiga is back, along with other new exciting products available from the end of September. We look forward to the Xmas period and believe that between all of us we can make it a pleasurable and profitable market once again.
On behalf of Amiga Technologies UK, Thank you for your attention!
JOHN SMITH
AMIGA TECHNOLOGIES UK
Some of you surely know how long and difficult the takeover of Commodore was and how much this one year of latency hurt the Amiga market. Building up everything again was also a difficult task for us. Especially the financial and logistic situation. Without the support from our mothercompany ESCOM AG, nothing would have been possible. We actually revived the Amiga in two important steps: First by acquiring the assets of the former Commodore for more than 10 million Dollars secondly by starting it up again, which requested again several times the initial investment. Other main difficulties we encountered were to get specific parts and components for production. D-RAMs are on allocation, Amiga keyboards, floppies and SCSI harddrives have long lead times. Tailor made parts are difficult to get and they cost more than in the old Commodore times.
Our first objective was to get Amiga products back on the market as fast as possible. To achieve this goal in an acceptable time, we decided to build the A1200 and A4000T without modifications. We have however included the new version 3.1 of the Operating System for the A1200.
Ladies and Gentlemen, please be aware that the A4000T already is a complete new product. There have only been produced 200 units worldwide by former Commodore. There will not be modifications on the casing for this year. The design proposals that were presented in Frankfurt are only a possibility for the models coming later. Please be aware : If we had decided to make enhancements immediately, there wouldn't have been machines on the market for the Christmas season. This decision does not mean in any way that we are going to stop research and development. Enhancements will be made on current machines for sure. I'll talk about this again later.
But now I would like to present you the actual status of our operations. We are a german company located in Bensheim, 30 miles south of Frankfurt. Our production, assembling and material providers are located in Europe but the world is our market. Our team has grown tremendously to reach 39 people since May 31st, with the new addition of Virtual Products.
We are a flexible, agressive, motivated, transparent and dynamic team. We can react very quickly to new situations, we take our strategic decisions faster than the competition does.
What is our team doing on distribution ?
The employees in these shops used to sell Amigas and we want to use their store traffic again. This will be an excellent additional sales tool to spread Amigas in the UK.
We will also support the Amiga dealers who have the best knowledge of the platform and who can provide excellent service to customers.
In North America, we already have installed a dealer network but are still looking for a potential distributor. Somebody who is willing to support and invest in our product. We are actually looking for a partner more than just a distributor.
And even better news, we will have a real european manufactured product.
The Amiga 1200 will be produced in Bordeaux, France. Our successful negotiations with Solectron, one of the world leader of sub-contract manufacturing, guarantees a european high quality standard. Quality is very important for us, we want to reduce defective returns to a minimum. That's why we focused on Europe rather than far-east.
The Amiga 4000T motherboards will be produced in the United States, near Philadelphia. The units for Europe will then be assembled in the ESCOM facilities in Germany. The american units will be assembled in Philadelphia.
We have made an agreement with a european monitor manufacturer. He will provide a monitor especially adapted to be used with the Amiga. The monitor is a high-quality multisync monitor that can scan horizontal frequencies from 15 to 38 KiloHertz. The plug of that monitor is also adapted to the video output connector of the A1200 and A4000T. I think this is exactly what is needed for all Amiga resolutions.
As announced at our previous press conference, our plan is still to build 100 K A1200's and 20 K A4000T's until the end of this year. These figures are based on existing orders and on customer based forecasts. I'm quite sure that this gives us the assurance that the whole production will actually be sold. A large percentage of our A1200 production will be sold alone in the UK.
Our service plan is very simple : we don't repair, we only make components exchanges.
First, we plan to enhance current models. We are thinking of faster processors and chip integration for the beginning. We are going to integrate the 68060 chip for the A4000T this year. For the entry-level model, we are looking at an external CD ROM addition and more RAM onboard the bare units.
We are also planning to use the CD 32 concept for developments of set-top-box systems. The set-top-boxes will open new markets for Amiga products. Set-top-Boxes could be produced in variants for cable-TV, satellite-TV and for telephone line communication and also be used for home-shopping and home-banking. I'm convinced that this market is tremendous and will push the Amiga technology into millions of households. Software publishers should be interested in writing software for such a widely spread platform. The Amiga architecture is optimaly suited for set-top-systems because of its low demand for ressources like RAM or processor power and because of its multitasking and realtime abilities, in summmary, the Amiga is the most cost effective platform for set-top-boxes.
It is still under investigation which RISC platform will be used as basis for the Amiga of the future. At this point, we cannot say more about this issue, thank you for your understanding.
May I point out that the Amiga version of the i-Glasses will be much cheaper than the PC version because it doesn't require the VGA-to-composite conversion box, since the Amiga 1200 already has a composite output.
