|1-Transcript of Press Conference |1-at Video Toaster Expo November 2nd 1995 Ladies and Gentlemen, distinguished guests. I am very glad to be here, in Los Angeles, at our first press conference in the United States. But let me introduce myself. My name is Petro Tyschtschenko. I am President at Amiga Technologies. I used to work 12 years at Commodore and I was responsible for the worldwide logistics. I will now say a few words about our organization and how we set it up. Amiga Technologies, GmbH is a 100% subsidiary of ESCOM AG. ESCOM AG is a public company. 25% of the shares belong to Quelle, the first retail chain in Germany, 12.5% to RWE, one of the biggest German cable and wire providers, 10% to Siemens-Nixdorf and 38.5% to Manfred Schmitt, founder and Chairman of the board. 14% are split among other shareholders. In August 1994, almost one year before the 21st of April, when ESCOM AG took over the rights of Commodore, Manfred Schmitt, Chairman at ESCOM AG told me, "Petro, I want the Amiga." From this day on, I was in charge of setting up the deal that the Amiga Community was waiting for: taking over the rights and patents of Commodore International and giving the Amiga a new home. It was a very difficult task. The situation with Commodore was complicated and many companies were also interested in getting the baby. But our strategy to keep silent about what we did helped us to be faster and more efficient. Nobody knew about ESCOM before the deal was completed. The next goal was to build up the company. This was announced officially during our press launch in Frankfurt, 30th of May, 1995. Amiga Technologies is now located in Bensheim, 60 Km southwards of Frankfurt and a few miles away from Heppenheim where ESCOM has its headquarters. We currently employ about 40 people and are growing on a daily basis. During our last press conferences, we made lots of promises and commitments. Today, I will rather show you something more concrete. Here is an Amiga 1200 (A1200 package stolz den begeisterten Zuschauern zeigen) and here is an Amiga 4000 Tower (Tower zeigen). These two products you can see here today represent the tremendous work done by our team in Germany, together with our strategic partners, in only three months. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have sold our first 10,000 Amiga 1200's in Europe. These were not only sold to our distributors and dealers. All of them went over the shelves to the end users. The demand is more than satisfying. We are happy to see that the Amiga didn't lose its appeal towards the customer. The success is like in earlier Commodore times, but the difference is that now a new management of competent and motivated people who love and know the Amiga is taking care of business. Our strength is that we are a dynamic team that can react quickly to new situations and we also learned from the mistakes Commodore made. Some people over here think that ESCOM AG acquired the rights to Commodore just to build a few computers for the Christmas season and leave the market afterwards. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is neither my style, nor the kind of business I like to do. Amiga is a long term project. We want to establish a market and give the Amiga the position it deserves because we believe that this product is a good alternative to PC's and Macintoshes. ESCOM invested several times the amount of money that was spent for the takeover of Commodore. We want this investment to fructify in the future and we know that our product has the best possible chances to succeed. The market in the USA is very important for us. I want to make a commitment here. We do not intend to concentrate our efforts only on Europe. Our location (is) in Bensheim, granted, but our market is worldwide. The A4000T is the product that is wanted most in the USA. We are currently thinking of the possibilities that we could have to market the A1200 here too. The American market is not only important to us for selling hardware. There also is a great potential of development intelligence here. Newtek, for instance, is an important partner for us. We want to support the Video Toaster and are currently negotiating with Newtek to build up a strong partnership and set up license agreements to get new products based on the Video Toaster technology. Newtek will also buy 1,000 A4000 Towers from us. Another partner for the American market is our new distributor, SMG. SMG will take care of distribution, spares and parts as well as organization of the distribution for North America. The Set-Top Box is an important topic at Amiga Technologies. We have now finalized agreements in the USA. I will mention our agreement with Viscorp that has just been finalized a few weeks ago. Through Set-Top Box systems, we are confident that the Amiga platform will enter into millions of households. No other computer manufacturer is able to provide a system that multitasks into 2 megabytes of memory at a cost effective price. Our partnership with SCALA brings SCALA MM300 to the user out of the box. All Amiga models fitted with hard drives include that popular multimedia package. More than a partner, SCALA is also an important customer for Amiga Technologies. SCALA purchased 1000 Amiga 4000 Towers to provide their customers with high-end multimedia systems. The demand for the Amiga 4000 T is also very high in Europe. We know that the price tag has been set quite high. This is due to the fact that the Amiga 4000 T is actually a new product for us. Setting up its production was an expensive task that needed the competencies and know-how of many people. The production costs are currently about 40% higher than in Commodore times. Actually, we planned to bring out the Amiga 4000 T before the Amiga 1200, but the complexity of this product made it impossible to respect the schedules. But, finally it is available. The first models came out of the lines this week. Ladies and Gentlemen, it was a great moment for us when the first Amiga board was finished in our A1200 production facility in France. It happened on the 13th of September, 1995. Here it is, just for your eyes. Ladies and Gentlemen, please be aware, the Amiga is the only computer which has a multitasking operating system that is not in the alpha or beta stage. Of course, we look at our competitors. I recently went to a fair where a computer manufacturer proudly presented its new machines. I asked one of the guys at the booth to demonstrate (for) me the multitasking abilities of his system and he replied, "Please wait a few minutes, Sir. As soon as this disk formatting is completed, I will show you real multitasking......No further questions." It is really encouraging to have a strong feature and to find out that some competitors don't even know what it is. Ladies and Gentlemen, our strength, more than the hardware platform, is our operating system. Amiga OS is excellent and will become even better. We have decided to port it to other platforms as soon as possible. Of course, we are also aware of the features that our system lacks. Long awaited features like memory protection, virtual memory and strong network abilities are on top of our TO-DO list. The next version of Amiga DOS will include all these important things. We also need software for the Amiga. It is absolutely necessary to improve the existing products as well as get new applications developed or ported to the Amiga OS. We are setting up the support for Amiga developers. This will be working through BBS systems and Internet. The German CBM EHQ is already up and running in Bensheim. We now also have an Amiga Technologies Web page. We will be very active on the Internet in the future. Ladies and Gentlemen, it is more and more evident every day that the combination of Intel and Windows 95 is not satisfying for many people. It is also a threat for the computer market that a monopoly like this tends to establish itself. Therefore, it is important that systems like the Amiga improve their market position, so that the user can still find an alternative way. To improve our market position, we know that we need to improve the product. This improvement has to be done on the hardware and the software side. The 68000 processor family from Motorola that is still powering our models will end its evolution after the 68060. We knew from the beginning that we had to look for a new processor. There were many options possible. Motorola proposed the Power PC. There was also the HP PA, the Minisparc or DEC Alpha processors. All of them had advantages and disadvantages. The choice was very hard, indeed. Ladies and Gentlemen, we made our choice. The next Amiga will be called the Power Amiga. We removed the PC for esthetical purposes. Let me now explain this choice. The Power PC processor is fast. Especially when it runs a decent operating system. We believe that with an operating system like the Amiga OS, the Power PC processor will show all the power that it has. It will be faster than with other operating systems. Another important reason for our choice is the strategic partnerships that this processor brings to us. Apple already did the experience of a migration from 68000 processors to Power PC and we can take advantage of this experience. We have now been in negotiations with Apple for a certain time and a future partnership between both companies is becoming realistic. Motorola and IBM will also be precious partners for the Power Amiga project; on the software side, as well as on the hardware side. Ladies and Gentlemen, all in all, the Power Amiga project will be involving more than a dozen companies. We are confident and think that such a synergy will make things happen very fast. Our team is ready to go. Thank you for your attention. End