08/19/96 OLIVETTI HEEDS ECHOES OF THE PAST

OLIVETTI HEEDS ECHOES OF THE PAST

TRY, TRY AGAIN. THAT'S THE advice Olivetti is taking to heart as it takes another pass at the U.S. computer market. Since 1983, the Italian computer and communications giant has twice jumped in, only to stumble and withdraw. Lured now by the hot portables market, it will take one more shot next week with a shipment of Echos, a line of four Pentium-based notebooks.
Nassir Ahmed, who moved Texas Instruments into the world's top 10 laptop suppliers in five years as its director of worldwide notebook marketing, leads the charge. Now CEO of Austin (Tex.)-based Olivetti Personal Computers USA, Ahmed aims to use relationships with Taiwanese notebook makers and U.S. distributors made at TI to put Olivetti among the top 10 U.S. laptop suppliers by mid-1998. His strategy: To couple aggressive pricing with a focus on small and midsize business customers largely ignored by IBM, Compaq, and Toshiba.
Ambitious? Surely. Aggressive newcomers, such as Hitachi, already have lopped 25% off the price of similar machines. That will force Olivetti to lower the prices on Echos, the cheapest of which has a 100-Mhz chip and was to sell for $2,499. Analysts Dataquest Europe says similar strategies have helped Olivetti double its Western Europe notebook market share to 4.9% in 1996's first six months.
EDITED BY LISA SANDERSM By Gary Williams