History (1999): ATG Becomes New ATG

Following the takeover of ATG by another French company, New Medias, the 12-inch WORM maker has been rechristened New ATG.

The new owners are Bruno Epale, CEO at New Medias, who will occupy the same position at New ATG, along with Philippe Berguignat, Denis Leglise and Philippe Raffard, who were former executives of computer consumables firm Media Systemes (acquired by ISA plc).

The New ATG team will likely be reduced from 73 people down to 33-38 employees, including a dozen in R&D.

This last group will try to make the most recent 12-inch, 16GB VFD-16000 compatible with previous generations of ATG’s WORM disks, currently not the case.

The team is also working on new 5.25-inch media.

Bruno Epale expects to orient New ATG towards double-layered DVD-9 and CD-ROM duplication. For the latter activity, he plans a shortterm investment of FF10 million (€1.5 million) in New ATG, which currently has capital of FF1.5 million (€230,000).

He forecasts sales of FF30 million (€4.6 million) in 1999 for the company with headquarters in Toulouse, in Southern France, not counting revenues from pressing 5 to 6 million CDs.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 135 on April from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.