The 1998 results had included a $160 million gain from the sale of a software subsidiary, Softimage.

Immediately a bid was made to enter the field of digital typography with a software subsidiary being set up in Tucson.

Apple released version 2.0 in 1986, and then a year later the program was published by Apple's new software subsidiary Claris.

It was later developed by Claris, the software subsidiary of Apple which was formed in 1987.

The software is the first big release from PalmSource, the software subsidiary the company created last year.

And last year, Reuters floated shares in its software subsidiary, Tibco.

The software subsidiaries of a large computer users are among the 40 large data-processing firms in Japan.

The firm employs 30 000 software specialists as part of the parent company and another 3000 in 11 software subsidiaries.

In addition Fujitsu has created an average of five new software subsidiaries annually for the past three years.

It started as the software subsidiary of Ariola Records.