History (1990): Wearnes of Singapore Becoming Tandberg Data Main Shareholder

On September 1, the German company Siemens sold 40% of its shares in Tandberg Data A/S (Oslo, Norway) to Wearnes Technology Pte. Ltd. of Singapore for 58.38 million Norwegian Kroners or $9.2 million.

Siemens formerly owned 58% of Tandberg’s shares, now it only has 18% and Wearnes has the option to buy the rest within two years. The remaining shares are held by private shareholders.

Siemens had recently sold to Microscience International, mainly owned by Wearnes, its rights on the Megafile disk drive family. Wearnes Technology is specialized in PCs, memories and microcomputer components. It’s the number 2 in electronic industry in its own country (behind Singapore Technologies Industrial Corp.) with $194 million sales in 1989.

Following the transfer of ownership, Per Otto Dyb, a 9-year veteran with Tandberg, was named president of Tandberg’s North American operation (or Tandberg Data, Inc.) reporting to Hans Lodrup, president and CEO.

Tandberg Data Inc. has also announced it has moved from the offices shared with Siemens in Newbury Park (CA), into new corporate offices at Westlake Village, CA.

Tandberg A/S had sales of $120 million last year, including $70 million by the Tandberg storage division.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠35, published on December 1990.