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                                           A Very Worried Look - ESCOM Saves Finnish Amiga Market?
                         Jukka Kauppinen                                                                                                     jkauppin@muikku.jmp.fi

For years, Finland has been a neglected market area for C= products. Since the official, big and good THOUGH expensive, C= representative PCI-Data backrupted (because gray imports), Finnish C= Spokesmans have been many in their numbers, and ALWAYS very ignorant what they represent and attempt to sell. After PCI-Data we had A Commodore Finland, for very short time. After their demise Finland was given to Toptronics, who were very unsuccessful and, as can be doubted, unwilling to promote the Amiga in any way. During Toptronics "good times" a company called "Man & Man" also was promoted to official C= Importer status, and while they had the will, they lacked the financial muscle to do what they wanted. Even worse, the MORE official C= representative Toptronics prevented every effort by other companies to advertise the Amiga, because "the other companies would make money with the reputation TOPTRONICS (HAH!) built for Amiga-name". Sometime 1991-1992 even they were dropped out of C= representative position, and a ghostly kind of C= office was opened in Finland. Office, really, since it consisted of ONE man, who first though Amiga is a IBM PC-clone brand. TRUE! He was very ignorant, and never really knew anything about the Amiga. Some Finnish Amiga dealers even demoed the machine to him to show what Amiga is about and what it can do. He never learned though. Very much credit can be given to this man of Amiga's fast demise in Finland. He was very successfull in giving hard time to all Finnish Amiga dealers - aal machines HAD to be ordered trough him, and he couln't deliver them, other than very late and just fraction of machines ordered. He had no knowledge, no technical specs, no information of anything at all. He could not support the dealers, couln't advertise at all, or give C= backing on Amiga advertising campaigns in Finland. The only Amiga AD campaign we've had in the '90s was 1993, when Man & Man SOMEHOW got a 50% C= backing, and decided then to double their own part so the campaign was 150% of the original size. They managed to sell more Amigas in the worst time of year than in any previous year's BEST time. But it wasn't that long campaign, and the financial support never came back. All Amiga dealers and most users with knowledge of the "inner happening" in Finnish Amiga market are, as far as I know, in same opinion that THIS ONE MAN has been mostly responsible with Amiga's problems in Finland. So when C= busted, this guy went over, and started to sell cars and furnitures. Great. He's gone. What next? Year passed. We got ESCOM. ESCOM makes press release for Finnish mags, and it looks good. Wow! They have Scandinavian HQ, and an office in Finland. Hey, it's 1990 when we've had DIRECT contact, a real office, of our Amiga-manufacturer's. Maybe we finally get some decent support, tech knowledge etc? Maybe NOW our dealers get help when they need to... Or so I thought... The POINT IS, that ESCOM'S COUNTRY MANAGER (FINLAND) is the SAME MAN that has ruined Amiga-market in Finland during whole '90s! SAME MAN! Again, we have Eero Walden, as the head of Finnish Amiga-market. The future doesn't look that bright after all. Say your prayers. Finland is lost, forever.