As the General manager of Amiga Technologies GmbH, I would like to welcome you to the first press conference of our new company and also tell you how much we appreciate your presence here.
At a spectacular auction five weeks ago in New York, ESCOM AG acquired the rights to the intellectual property of the former Commodore company for 10 million dollars, including all trademarks, logos, products and licenses.
Since the day we succeeded in buying the Amiga technology, many people have asked us how the future will look for their computer of choice. We got floods of anxious faxes and letters to which we couldn't give an answer at once because things were too early to comment. We will use the opportunity we have now to talk you all of you and present the new ESCOM daughter company, Amiga Technologies. Some leading developers of hardware and software for the Amiga as well as some of our new licensing partners will present themselves and their projects to us.
To clear up things from the beginning - and that's the point you are all interested in - I want to make the commitment that we are determined to resume production and also want to continue hardware and software developmetn of what we believe is a superior technology. That's why we created Amiga Technologies and we are now hiring the best and most capable people to accomplish this.
For a successful Multimedia company like ESCOM, the Commodore Patents and licenses concerning Amiga are considered the key to multimedia technology. Mister Schmitt will say more about this later.
But let's concentrate on our immediate plans. As the director of Amiga Technologies my first priority now is to resume production of Commodore and Amiga computers and bring them on the market as soon as possible. For us, this means September 1995.
I would also like to refer to Commodore computers, Pentium PCs, which will be available in August this year. These will be fully loaded P75 and P100 multimedia PCs. They will be assembled in our own ESCOM facilities. We plan to sell between 50,000 and 60,000 units before the end of this year. Let me point out that the Commodore and Amiga operations will be separate. Amiga Technologies will only take care of Amiga, whereas ESCOM will provide Commodore PCs.
One month later, we will start producing the high-end multimedia Amiga 4000T. To succeed in keeping that tight schedule, we negotiated with well known producers in Europe and Asia. For the selection of the manufacturing partner, we will be empasizing the quality requirements.
Until the end of the year, we plan to produces enough machines to meet the demand. These machines are already outsold in pre-orders. In October, the production of the low-end A1200 will begin. We expect to ship enough units as well as CD32 game consoles to meet the Christmas season demand. Please give us more time to publish quantities.
The takeover of the inventory, which is mainly composed of spare parts, in the UK and Germany is completed. The rumoured stocks of new Amigas ready to be sold do not exist. For inventory in the Phillipines, we are currently negotiating with the local trustees.
Ladies and gentlemen, the new Amiga Technology will now become the operating center of an international Company held 100% by ESCOM AG. Our headquarters in Bensheim will employ around 50 people for following tasks: development, support to developers, resellers, end users, production management, Marketing, PR and administration. We also took over the former Commodore development center in Norristown, with its research and developmetn facilities. Eduard Goff, former Vice President and General Counsel at Commodore now leads that center. He will talk to you later. Our developers are now working on the next generation RISC based Amigas as well as on improving current models. Here, we are working in a tight partnership with Scala and Motorola.
Amiga Technologies GmbH expects a turnover of 100 Mio DM in 1995, mainly from the Christmas business with Amiga 1200, 4000 and CD32. Our monthly expenses are evaluated at around 600,000 DM. The break-even point should be reached this year. We are confident that we will have rentabilized our 10 million dollar investment by spring 1996 with Amiga sales and licences.
I will be here again for further questions later this afternoon, but now let me introduce M Manfred Schmitt, Chairman of the executive board at ESCOM.
Thank you.