Vodafone's Christopher Gent on China Mobile Purchase: Comment
--From AOL.-- Cooters
Hong Kong, Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Chris Gent, chief executive of Vodafone Group Plc, talks about his company's agreement to pay $2.5 billion for about 2 percent of China Mobile (H.K.) Ltd.
``We hope to work with them over the years to come and build our position into a bigger equity holding. We want to work with them in the international standards arena, we want to get a data Internet platform in to them, which we will do if they like it.''
``On all economic terms this would be accretive to us. This is a highly valued business, a highly rated business, so we're very pleased with the basic economic fundamentals. More to the point, this is a 3.4 percent-penetrated market, and this is a company very well run by Chairman Wang and his team. So the upside is immense.
``The downside is that if things don't work out between us -- and obviously we don't want that to happen -- we can exit through the public markets.''
``We are going to configure a chairman's forum where I can discuss matters of how we cooperate, how we're helping. We are going to bring in (people) to help them in various business areas. If and as in when we get a higher percentage, then we can look at the board representation.''
``WCDMA is the approved 3G technology, and that decision, I might add was made at a meeting of operators in China. We are both very strong on GSM, WAP, and GPRS, so there's a commonality of interests there. And we'll be migrating from that to wide-band CDMA as the 3G standard.''
Oct/04/2000 11:06 ET |
