Apple Computer is expected to announce cuts of up to 600 jobs at its plant at Cork in southwest Ireland this week, the Sunday Business Post of Dublin reported.
The job cuts are expected in light of Apple's decision to subcontract production of its iMac computer to South Korea's LG Electronics, the newspaper reported.
A company official declined to comment on the report.
The paper said it was believed iMac production would move to an electronics complex planned by LG Electronics for Newport in Wales and that Cork would continue to produce Apple's high-end Power Macintosh G3 models.
Apple announced in July that 150 jobs would be cut because the computer maker was outsourcing its printed circuit board operations. A company spokesman said at the time the Cork plant would become the European manufacturing base for the new iMac computer.
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Telecoms giants ponder wireless alliance: British Telecommunications and AT&T are considering a link between their respective mobile phone operations, The Sunday Times of London reported.
BT Chief Executive Peter Bonfield told the newspaper that a deal was possible between its Cellnet unit, in which it owns 60 percent and the US long-distance carrier.
The two telecom giants already have a $10 billion international alliance in the pipeline, plans for which were announced last July. The new alliance, which combines their international assets only, would provide telecom services to multinational corporations.
Bonfield said the next step could be a deal to give mobile phone users reciprocal access in the United States and Europe.
The possibility of a BT-AT&T link-up comes weeks after Britain's Vodafone bid to take over American company AirTouch Communications to create the world's biggest mobile phone company.
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Bertelsmann online challenges Amazon.com in Europe: German media giant Bertelsmann said it expected its online bookselling operation to compete strongly with the pioneer Internet bookseller Amazon.
"In the United States we want to be a tough competitor for Amazon and No.1 in Europe," Klaus Eierhoff, Bertelsmann's multimedia chief, said in an interview with Der Spiegel news magazine Saturday.
The group's European online bookselling operation, BOL International, starts operations Thursday in Germany and France. Operations will expand to England and the Netherlands this spring and to Spain by the end of the year.
Amazon.com started business in Germany and Britain in October.
Bertelsmann bought 50 percent of the online venture of bookseller Barnes & Noble's barnesandnoble.com for US $200 million in October and the merged online unit will seek a stock market listing at the end of February.
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IBM pays 25 percent of profits in staff bonuses: International Business Machines will pay US$1.6 billion in performance-based cash bonuses to its employees for 1998, 21 percent above what it paid in 1997, a spokesman said.
The incentive -- for which IBM's 291,000 employees are eligible -- is calculated according to both individual job performance and the performance of the employee's business unit, a spokesman for the world's largest computer maker said.
The bonuses amount to 25 percent of the net profits IBM reported last year, he said. Net income of $6.3 billion rose 4 percent from $6.1 billion in 1997, although IBM's stock repurchase program helped boost earnings per share by 9 percent from year to year. Revenues of $81.7 billion also rose 4 percent from 1997's $78.5 billion. The variable compensation plan is only one piece of IBM's overall effort to peg employee compensation to performance and reflects a growing trend by US companies toward performance-related pay as a way to motivate employees. At IBM, a top performer in a top performing unit can qualify for up to a 20 percent cash bonus over and above his or her base pay, the spokesman said.
Copyright© 1999 Reuters Limited.
