Word: atari
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Olympic Sales in downtown Los Angeles last week, an Atari home computer that cost $630 three years ago carried a price tag of $77.95. At Lechmere Sales in Cambridge, Mass., Texas Instruments micros that retailed for $525 in 1981 could be had for less than $100. Gemco stores in California were selling Commodore 64 computers for $199 each, two-thirds off their price of six months ago. In Chicago, K mart was unloading tiny Timex Sinclair 1000s, listed last year at $99.95, for $29.97 each...
...current quarter, Wall Street turned negative on the company's stock. Shares of TI, one of the world's largest manufacturers of silicon chips, dropped 40 points in one day, trimming nearly $1 billion from the company's paper value. On the heels of Atari's multimillion-dollar loss last quarter, it looked as if one segment of the computer revolution was wobbling...
...Atari has been a victim of rough competition. The robust growth of the video-game industry has drawn so many new entrants that profits are increasingly hard to come by. More than 20 companies are now producing cartridges that play on Atari machines. While about 350 new game titles were released in all of 1982, dealers were inundated with 317 new ones in January of this year alone. Moreover, price cutting is rampant...
...same time, Atari has not kept up with the fast-paced video-game market. Said one industry watcher: "A game company has to keep ahead technologically-invent and reinvent. If you don't have both the marketing and technical savvy, you're going to get killed." That is indeed what happened, when other video-game manufacturers came out with products that had superior graphics...
...Atari, of course, is not the only video-game company having troubles. Mattel's electronics division, whose Intellivision was the second bestselling game last year, lost $28.2 million in the three months ending Jan. 29, and expects to lose about the same amount during the next quarter. The company blames the red ink on heavy advertising expenses, price cutting and slower sales...