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FINANCIAL HEALTH OF ATARI

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V5130B::MENTON

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Sep 21, 1986, 4:31:52 PM9/21/86
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Re my earlier posting, mentioning a "Computer Chronicles" cable TV
show in which the financial health of Atari was seriously questioned:
either they meant 'Commodore', as my friend John Sangster suggested, or
as C-3PO would put it, "Old data" (I hope - I only caught the last few
minutes of the show, and it may have been 1 1/2 years old!
Bob Menton
MENTON@NRL-ACOUSTICS

------

j...@mitre-bedford.arpa

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Sep 21, 1986, 7:55:06 PM9/21/86
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I have heard from a "usually reliable source" -- one with fairly good sources
inside Atari -- that the information in that show is probably about 2 years
out of date. Atari has for a couple of years had only around 1000 employees,
and they have NOT recently laid off 6000 of that 1000.

-John Sangster
j...@mitre-bedford.arpa

ma...@ubc-cs.uucp

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Sep 22, 1986, 11:39:43 AM9/22/86
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It's fairly hard to reconcile the rumours of Atari's financial problems with
their announcement that they are going public. One goes public to attract
capital, which might suggest that they're cash-short, but it's rather hard
to find investors who would propose to sink money into a company on the
verge of going down the drain.

Since financial information on Atari is hard to obtain, it's hard to know
what's going on without looking at the prospectus. However, I suspect that
the accounts I've seen in places like INFOWORLD and BYTE are more likely
than most: Atari has been selling all the ST's they can make, but they can't
make enough. In that light, an IPO seems reasonable, in that it might help
them to afford more production equipment, warehousing, and inventory.

LocklearLB

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Sep 22, 1986, 12:12:41 PM9/22/86
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I am pretty sure that this was old data. Atari layed off many of their workers
when they were owned by Warner. This was due to shifting much of the production
of their video games to offshore facilities. I haven't heard of any layoffs since
Jack has owned the company.

Barry Locklear

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