Consumer goods group Unilever plans to speed up the launch of its anti-cholesterol margarine, Finnish daily Kauppalehti said on Thursday. The paper quoted unidentified sources as saying the launch of Unilever's margarine, which would compete with a similar product made by Finnish company Raisio, could take place this autumn rather than in early 1999 as originally planned. A Unilever spokesman contacted by the newspaper neither confirmed nor denied the report.

Oki, Compaq team up in E-commerce system

Japan's Oki Electric Industry Co Ltd, Compaq Computer Corp and GlobeSet Inc of the United States said on Thursday they had agreed to tie up in the development of electronic commerce settlement systems. The three companies will cooperate in the development of Japanese-language settlement systems as well as in marketing and servicing the systems, the companies said in a statement. The systems will be based on software protocol Secure Electronic TransactionVersion 1.0, it said.

DirecTV Japan subscribers up

Direct-to-home television broadcaster DirecTV Japan Management Inc said on Thursday that it had 167,400 subscribers as of the end of August, up from 152,000 at the end of July. DirecTV, partly owned by Hughes Electronics Corp, begun its service in December 1997. The company said earlier this month that it would launch a non-demand information service for TV viewers. It said that its new "Interactive TV" service would enable viewers to call up on demand a variety of additional information transmitted simultaneously with video.