In the United States, HP - HEWLETT PACKARD has bought up its rival, COMPAQ, thus creating a new information technology giant to directly rival IBM. With a turnover of $87 billion (47 billion for HP and 40 billion for COMPAQ), the new group will rank at the top of the PC market, ranking second for servers and third for services. It will employ 135,000 in 160 countries. The transaction will be carried out via a share swap amounting to $25 billion. Each COMPAQ share will be exchanged for 0.6325...