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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: quidditch who wrote (2022)	10/2/1999 12:07:00 PM
From: Ramsey Su	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

Message 11427236 For those looking for something to do this weekend, this looks like a good candidate. Ramsey

To: quidditch who wrote (2022)	10/4/1999 10:40:00 PM
From: quidditch	Respond to of 13582

Wu tightens the noose in China: ChinaTel to Pay $6.4 Billion for 3 Mobile Networks By Biddy Chan at Bloomberg News 04 October 1999 China Telecom (H.K.) Ltd. said it will pay its parent $6.4 billion for three mobile phone networks in China and finance the purchase by selling stocks, bonds and issuing new shares. The purchase, first proposed in mid-July, will expand ChinaTelecom's subscriber base by more than a third. Its planned $1.65 billion sale of new shares will be among Asia's biggest this year, while its $500 million bond sale is the company's first attempt to sell debt in international markets. To complete the purchase, China Telecom will also issue $3.95 billion of new shares to its unlisted parent, China Telecom (H.K.) Group, whose stake may drop to about 75% from 76.43 percent. The company is ultimately controled by China's Ministry of Information Industry. China Telecom has the second-highest weighting in Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index, accounting for 10.81% of the benchmark measure. It's the No. 1 cellular provider in the three provinces where it already has networks. "Their brand name is very strong," said John Lai, chief investment officer at Nikko Global Asset Management (H.K.) Ltd. "It's a question of valuation." The $6.5 billion purchase price for the networks in the Chinese provinces of Henan, Fujian and Hainan represents 21.4 times the networks' 1999 earnings of 2.48 billion yuan ($299 million), the company said, according to material presented for an analysts' presentation. They carry combined debt of 2.22 billion yuan. The acquisition will further consolidate China Telecom (Hong Kong)'s market position and China's cellular market and strengthen our overall growth profile," said Chairman Wang Xiaochu. China Telecom said it expects to complete the financing by the end of this month. The acquisition should be finished by early November, it said. Goldman Sachs (Asia) LLC, China International Capital Corp. (Hong Kong) Ltd. and Bear Stearns Asia Ltd. are arranging the stock sale. Chase Securities Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. and Bank of China International Capital Ltd. are arranging the bond sale. The company plans to begin presentations on October 14 in Hong Kong to investors for the stock and bond sale, bankers said. Those presentations will end October 25 in New York, they said. Pricing of both stocks and bonds is scheduled to take place on either October 25 or October 26. The stock and bond sale is one of several that are being planned by Chinese companies this month. CNOOC Ltd., China's largest offshore oil exploraton and production company, is in the middle of a series of global presentations fora first-time share sale that aims to raise as much as $2.5 billion. The three new networks had a total of 3.41 million subscribers and an average market share of 97.4% as of June. China Telecom's existing networks in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces had a combined 8.81 million subscribers and an average market share of 91.4% in the same period. After the acquisition, China Telecom said its%age of all mobile phone subscribers in China will increase to 36.3 percent from 26.2%. It's the second acquisition by China Telecom since it first sold shares in October 1997, when it raised $4 billion - the largest stock sale in Asia outside Japan at the time. In June, it paid $2.9 billion to buy its third mobile network, in Jiangsu province, using proceeds from its initial share sale. In the bond sale, China Telecom is aiming to sell 10-year bonds priced to yield about 2.2%age points more than U.S. Treasuries with a similar maturity, bankers said last week. The bond sale will be closely watched by money managers and other Hong Kong and Chinese companies. They will also be looking at the level of government support for the company in its first attempt to sell bonds abroad. A price of 2.2 percentage points more than U.S. Treasuries would value the bonds close to the rate of China's government bonds. China's 10-year U.S. dollar government bonds now yield about 1.9%age points more than U.S. Treasuries. China Telecom shares are up 85% this year, compared with a 31% gain in the Hang Seng. The shares rose 3.6 percent today HK$24.80 before the acquisition was announced after the stock market closed. Copyright 1999, Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.