Toyota starts building British castings plant: Toyota Motor Corp said on Wednesday it started building a new castings plant at its existing engine plant in Deeside, North Wales. The construction of the new plant will be completed in the year 2000 and will bring Toyota's total investment in its British manufacturing operations to almost 1.5 billion pounds, Japan's largest carmaker said. The new plant, adjacent to the engine plant, will employ more than 60 workers. The plant will supply aluminium cylinder heads and blocks for 1.6- and 1.8-litre engines of Toyota's British-made Avensis and Corolla models. The British plant is expected to produce engines for use in its French-made compact cars in the future.

Logica in four-for-one bonus issue: UK software and computer systems group Logica Plc said on Wednesday that it was recommending a four-for-one bonus share issue to improve the liquidity of its shares. The planned issue will be put to shareholders at the annual meeting on November 4. The group, which earlier unveiled record annual pre-tax profits up 49 per cent and a 40-per cent rise in revenues, also said the long term trends for its industry were positive and market conditions in general buoyant. "We do not see any signs of slowdown in the UK market but we are, of course, cautious in South East Asia," the company said in its results statement.

LucasVarity wins $1.48bn contracts: Anglo-American engineering group LucasVarity Plc on Wednesday announced contracts for its Lucas Aerospace division worth a total of 920 million pounds ($1.48 billion). The largest contract is to supply the complete "fly-by-wire" automatic flight control system on Fairchild Aerospace's new 728JET for 600 million pounds. The remaining 320 million pounds of contracts are to supply a major portion of the primary and secondary flight controls and thrust reverser actuation on the Airbus A340-500/600.

Oki, Lucent to develop system for NTT: Oki Electric Industry Co Ltd and Lucent Technologies Inc announced on Wednesday they would develop a high-speed digital access system for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT). The product, called the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) access System, will be released in June 1999 and will be installed in NTT's nationwide passive optical network (PON) for business customers, Oki said. The PON network, which is currently being built, will allow high-speed data transmission through fibre optic cables and will support multimedia applications such as video conferencing, the company said. Oki and Lucent have previously developed cellular phones together.

Nokia, Ericsson eye Singapore client: Finnish and Swedish rivalling telecom equipment groups Nokia and Ericsson are competing for a major order from Star Hub in Singapore, Finnish business daily Kauppalehti reported on Wednesday. Star Hub is expected to decide at the latest next week which one of the two groups will build its fixed network and a mobile GSM network, the paper said. The paper said Star Hub was prepared to invest six billion markka ($1.1 billion) in the networks over the next five years. Nokia declined to comment on the report.

Dainippon, IBM to launch new software: Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co Ltd and IBM Japan said on Wednesday that they would launch four electronic watermark software for digital graphic contents in September and October. A spokesman said that the four softwares were jointly developed by the two companies under a tieup agreed last October. Prices of the softwares, which include individual use as well as professional use, will range between 98,000 to 11.8 million yen, the spokesman said. Two of the softwares, named RenaMark and RenaScramble, will enable engraving of electronic watermark in digital graphics contents in a large batch simultaneously and prepare the watermarked data for transmission, the spokesman said.