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To: Ruffian who wrote (35172)	7/15/1999 11:36:00 PM
From: JohnG	Respond to of 152472

Michael P.--SEC fileings also available at Q web site. Saves trouble of EDGAR search. Yahoo has limited fileings as part of info you pull up for a ticker. John

To: Ruffian who wrote (35172)	7/16/1999 6:26:00 AM
From: DaveMG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

China boosts Unicom but no gains for stock offer By William Kazer SHANGHAI, July 16 (Reuters) - China has given upstart telephone company Unicom a major boost with a gift of valuable assets from the railway network but they probably will not be part of a planned $1 billion stock offer. The Railway Ministry's communications network, said to be valued at 10 billion yuan ($1.2 billion), will be injected into China Unicom but this will take too much time to be included in the public vehicle, China Unicom officials said on Friday. ''It is not too likely that they will be in the listed company,'' a Unicom official told Reuters. ''Determining the ownership of the assets is a complicated process,'' he said. ''It can't be done before the end of the year.'' China Unicom, formally known as China United Telecommunications Corp, was set up in 1994 to compete with the industry giant now known as China Telecom. It wants to offer shares by the end of the year for a listing in Hong Kong and on Nasdaq. China Telecom already has a Hong Kong-listed vehicle, China Telecom (Hong Kong) , which operates mobile telephone networks on the Chinese mainland. Railway Ministry officials said the ministry's communications assets were being reorganised but this was in its early stages and still needed time for completion. ''We have been preparing for about a year but a separate company has not been formally set up,'' said a railway official. He said ownership of assets now under the ministry had to be clarified before they could be handed over to Unicom. The railway ministry, one of the original 16 investors in China Unicom, has 120,000 km (75,000 miles) of telecommunications lines around the country. While the listed portion of China Unicom will be a paging and mobile telephone company, the group eventually will expand its fixed line telephone service, aided substantially by the railway ministry assets, analysts said. ''Unicom will save on capital spending,'' said Philip Mok, analyst at SG Securities in Hong Kong. China Unicom has some fixed-line telephone operations but to date they have not produced significant revenues. Its fixed-line network in the northern city of Tianjin, for example, was initially hampered by the main network operator's refusal to connect the two systems. Those difficulties have been overcome but there are still technical problems that have held back development, Unicom officials said. When Unicom was set up its backers had planned to build on the underutilised private telephone networks of the railway and power sectors to form a competitor to the public monopoly, then operated under the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. One of Unicom's key problems was it never managed to obtain the assets of its shareholders. ''Due to the vested interests of the individual shareholders these assets were never transferred to Unicom,'' said an industry analyst who asked not to be named. That convinced the fledgling company to link up with foreign partners and move into mobile telephones. China has since said it was turning the paging assets of China Telecom over to Unicom to give it a more stable source of revenue. Analysts said the injection of railway assets could eventually make Unicom look more like what its founders had envisioned when they created the company. ($1 equals 8.28 yuan)