December 17, 1996 5:45 PM ET
Kingston employees to get $75,000 in Xmas stockings
By Maria Seminerio

Christmas will come a little early for the 523 full-time employees of memory module developer Kingston Technology Corp. Four months after the company was bought by Tokyo-based IT giant Softbank Corp. (also the owner of PC Week publisher Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.), its management decided to share the $100 million windfall earned from the merger with Kingston workers, who will divide up roughly $40 million worth of the bounty, company officials said today. That translates to an average of $75,000 per full-time worker, to be distributed over the next few months, said Kingston Marketing VP Gary MacDonald. Some employees will receive as much as $300,000, company officials said. Once the news started getting out--workers were given the news at the company holiday party this past Sunday, and this morning Kingston officials sat for several interviews on television news shows--a deluge of resumes descended upon Kingston's Fountain Valley, Calif., offices, MacDonald said. "If we hired every applicant we've had in the last 24 hours, we'd have about 5,000" employees, he said. If Cathy Gaertner's sentiments are shared by the rest of Kingston's workers, company executives will be glad they decided to spread the wealth. "It just makes me want to work harder for the company," said Gaertner, a 25-year-old telemarketing representative who has worked for Kingston for a year and a half. "It's like winning the lottery." Copyright(c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company is prohibited. PC Week and the PC Week logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. PC Week Online and the PC Week Online logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. Send mail to PC Week