TECHNOLOGY : U.S. PC Makers See No Immediate Surge in Soviet Bloc Sales

About a year ago, Apple Computer Chairman John Sculley wanted to take a Macintosh personal computer with him on a business trip to Moscow. But taking a computer to the Soviet Union was a lot easier said than done.

Only after encountering lengthy delays and lots of U.S. government red tape was Apple’s chief executive able to get the necessary approvals from the U.S. Department of Commerce and Department of Defense. The experience, however, may well have left him wondering about the difficulty of swinging a deal for the sale of hundreds or thousands of Macintoshes to the Soviet Union.

Sculley might have an easier time of it soon.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher announced plans Tuesday to relax rules on exports of certain personal computers to the Soviet Union and the East Bloc. The new policy, considered virtually certain to win the necessary approval of America’s allies, would allow U.S. companies to sell computers using Western technology developed in the mid-1980s to the Soviet Bloc without obtaining special licenses. Controls would remain in place on exports of the most sophisticated PCs.

Although U.S. computer makers said the plan is unlikely to spark a sudden surge in PC sales to the East Bloc, they called the move an encouraging development.

“We don’t think it will impact us a lot at this point,” said Stacey Byrnes, an Apple spokeswoman in Cupertino. “But it is a very positive step in the right direction that will make the U.S. computer industry more competitive in the international market.”

Mark Holcomb, a spokesman for IBM Corp., said it is too early to gauge the full impact of the move.

“Given their (the Soviets) expressed interest in desktop technology, this ought to enhance demand,” Holcomb said. But, he added, “there are a range of factors that affect demand for computer products in the East Bloc, and export controls are just one of them.”

American companies said the Soviet Union’s lack of Western currencies remains a big problem because it limits the Soviets’ ability to buy foreign goods. Demand also will be held back by the lack of people in the Eastern Bloc who are trained to use computers. Although the Soviet Union has a large pool of skilled computer programmers, the vast majority of schoolchildren and office workers have never used a computer.

Cliff Lindsey, a vice president with the San Jose market research firm Dataquest, said he expects the new export policy to double Western sales of PCs to the Soviet Union during the next year. “The volume of activity, however, is still pretty low,” he said.

There are an estimated 300,000 personal computers in the Soviet Union today--about the same number in the United States a decade ago. Dataquest estimates the potential Soviet market at 20 million machines.

“The Soviets have a very rich appetite for computers,” Lindsey said. “There’s a lot of demand for computers in the classroom . . . . You have to build a base of users before you’re going to have a big demand” for computers in the home or office, he said.

Steven Popper, a Rand Corp. economist who specializes in East Bloc technology issues, said the Soviet Union has been attempting to develop its own personal computer industry, but with little success. “Either they have made fundamental errors in design, or they have run into bottlenecks,” Popper said. Problems included conflicts between ministries in which one ministry would refuse to provide components for another ministry’s program.

As a result, Popper said, demand for Western computer products would exist for many years to come, but he suggested that the immediate impact of the loosened export curbs would be mainly symbolic. “They have been able to get their hands on AT-type equipment. In some countries, the problem is not just getting the equipment, but paying for it.”