Datrontech pairs up with Memory

Chips Joint venture with flagging company will sell DRam.

Datrontech and Memory Corporation are to join forces to create a company to sell DRam processors.

The joint venture, called Dtec Memory Corporation (DMC), began operation this week.

Memory holds a 51 per cent stake in the venture and Datrontech holds 49 per cent.

Andrew MacKenzie, director of memory sales at Datrontech, has been appointed managing director of the joint venture.

UK-based Memory Corporation has developed a proprietary method of enabling defective DRam to be recovered and fixed.

The method was greeted with great enthusiasm by the market when it was first announced, but shares in the company have languished for some time and stood at 26.5p on 2 February.

The deal will mean the end of the relationship between Memory Corporation and Vanguard UK, formerly Memory's exclusive agent. Vanguard set up the vendor's UK distribution policy.

But as memory modules became commodities, Vanguard's association with Memory became increasingly redundant.

Roy Taylor and John Byrne, directors of Vanguard UK, were joint managing directors of subsidiary VCM, which linked to Memory Corporation.

Taylor said: 'In the past, John and I had an involvement for a separate business called VCM. But over the past 18 months, Vanguard has taken up much more of our time and attention.

'It was inevitable that we would have parted company after this joint venture.'

Taylor and Byrne are now joint managing directors for the European agency of a large Taiwanese company called Vanguard - no relation to Vanguard UK - which manufactures memory products.

Mark Mulford, chief executive of Datrontech, said: 'DMC will complement our existing memory business and will use Datrontech's infrastructure and staff to promote our current memory products to new markets.'