History (1994): Nomaï to Pay Royalties to SyOuest

“Nomaï and SyOuest have signed a letter of intent to find an agreement in which Nomaï will pay royalties to SyOuest for the manufacturing and selling of compatible 44 and 88MB cartridges sold during 1994 and 1995,” said Hervé Frouin, GM of Nomaï (Avranches, France) at the beginning of last April.

The agreement doesn’t apply to the new 200MB 5.25-inch cartridges.

The final agreement has nevertheless not been ratified. The proof is the recent press release from SyOuest (Fremont, CA) entitled: “No agreement in SyQuest settlement negotiations” which adds that “No definitive agreement has been reached to settle its litigation vs. Iomega (a distributor of Nomaï’s cartridges) and Nomaï.“

Both parties are actually discussing some details. The amount of royalties the French firm will have to pay to the US company were not disclosed. The agreement doesn’t cover 3.5-inch cartridges for which Nomaï has a project underway to manufacture a drive with a media storing from 500 to 700MB, the equivalent of a CD-ROM.

Iomega now sells Nomaï’s cartridges under its own brand name and said their sales in 1993 were more than 200,000 units shipped.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 76, published on May 1994.