NEC concludes supercomputer distributorship agreement with CrayMunich 01 March 2001 NEC Corporation (NEC) announced on February 28 that it agreed a distributorship relationship with the U.S. company, Cray Inc. (Cray) for the sales, installation and support of the NEC SX vector supercomputers. NEC and Cray signed the agreement regarding co-operation in the field of supercomputers.
In their press release the partners published the contents of their distribution agreement. It gives Cray exclusive rights to distribute the NEC SX-5 Series and its successor vector supercomputers in North America, and non-exclusive rights in the rest of the world. Cray will resell these supercomputers as one of its product lines exclusively in the US, Canada and Mexico. After confirming that it is permissible under applicable antitrust laws and regulations, Cray will sell NEC's high performance supercomputers in Europe and other areas under the non-exclusive right.
An other element in the contract is the co-operation of NEC and Cray to promote its sales activities for SX-5 Series and its successor models.
The last published topic concerns their relationship. In order to strengthen it between the two companies in the field of supercomputers, NEC will invest $25M in Cray's nonvoting preferred stock.
An extremely important issue in this partnership are the antidumping duties that the U.S. International Trade Commission imposed in 1997 on Japanese supercomputer makers NEC and Fujitsu. This means that duties of 454 percent are set on NEC and 173 percent on Fujitsu and 313 percent on all other Japanese supercomputers imported into the United States. In order to facilitate performance of this agreement, it is necessary to revoke dumping duties to Japanese vector supercomputers in the U.S. and revocation of these dumping duties is a condition for effectuation of this agreement.
NEC announced its first SX Series supercomputer in 1983. The SX-5 Series, which is the current and primary model under this agreement, is the fourth generation product developed by NEC. Its peak vector-processing speed is 5 TeraFlop/s (five trillion floating point operations per second) and it is the world's fastest vector type super computer for commercial use.
The original Cray Research Inc. (CRI), founded by Seymour Cray, was a pioneering company in high performance computing. CRI was sold to Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in February 1996; then acquired by Tera Computer Company in April 2000. Tera changed its name to Cray Inc. Cray will sell the vector supercomputer SV1 and SX-5 Series systems as well as other current Cray products.
Cray has in depth experience in marketing supercomputers world-wide. This agreement will combine NEC's technology with Cray's sales and support infrastructure. Cray will now be able to respond to the customers requiring high-end vector supercomputers by filling an important gap in their product line. NEC expects to expand its sales through Cray's sales channel.
Since the sales rights will be transferred exclusively to Cray, NEC's current U.S. sales and support organisation, HNSX Supercomputers, Inc., will transition into Cray over next 12 months.
Uwe Harms |
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