PTNR Partner Communications the only one of the three cellular carriers in Israel to trade in the US has 420,000 customers and a market cap over $1 billion.
Mirs ampal.com without Israel's cellular license has over 100,000 wireless business and government customers. Mirs customers should increase quickly after receiving a cellular license.
AMPL 's 25% stake in Mirs could easily be worth the $169 million of AMPL's market cap, so you get AMPL 's 59 other holdings for free!
copy from an informative Yahoo post by weda_IL
Mirs is held by AMPL
by: weda_IL 11/17/00 11:24 am
Msg: 4055 of 4056
Mirs is going to be the 4'th cellular operator in Israel. PTNR, which is the 3'rd in size, and the one which loses the most (mainly due to financial loans, the cellular biz is good, israelis are crazy about cellulars), is currently evaluated $1B (and its IPO was above 2 !).
In addition, Mirs is profitable: Mirs & Cellcom are profitable, actually Cellcom just issued its superb reports this week to the israeli stock market (although it's not public, it is held by daskash, a big israeli holding company) and showed how profitable this business can be in Israel, pelephone & partner aren't, yet.
I leave you to run some numbers to get the huge impact of that on AMPL valuation...
(check again current AMPL valuation, there's a big room here) ;)
Now to the 2'nd question. Mirs has around 150K users, way below the other 3.
BUT
and that's a real big but (!)
these are business users, not stingy home users ;)
Why do you think they are so profitable?
Also, note currently their system is defined as a communication network, not cellular (and this is why you probably didn't see them in analist coverage papers on PTNR, for example).
An error they made.
For more details you can check their (hebrew, sorry) website: mirs.co.il & wap.mirs.co.il (yes, they have cellular internet, actually, they were the 1'st to introduce it).
For ampal: ampal.com
In recent months I heard many radio commercials about mirs (with Mudy Bar-On, for the israelis who read this, from the channel 5 saturday night soccer program). Since their current client base is biz people, it's a clever & economic way to market. All the other 3 cellular's spend huge amounts of money on double spread ads in papers.
Thin, sharp & directed company! :) |
