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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maya who wrote (46479)	10/22/1999 8:01:00 PM
From: Robert Pekka	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

How about iCompression or StreamMachine?

To: Maya who wrote (46479)	10/25/1999 1:17:00 AM
From: Stoctrash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Monday October 25, 12:35 am Eastern Time INTERVIEW-China unleashes major telecom competitor By Matt Pottinger BEIJING, Oct 25 (Reuters) - China will unveil its third major telecommunications carrier on Thursday, a move analysts say will heat up competition in the booming sector and catapult Internet speeds to levels ahead of much of the world. China Netcom Corp (CNC) is building a 20-gigabyte Internet backbone which will reach 15 Chinese cities by the end of next July, company chief executive Edward Tian said. ''It'll be one of the highest-speed backbones in the world,'' Tian told Reuters. CNC, which will begin offering Internet Protocol (IP) telephone services on Thursday, was set up earlier this year by a handful of government bodies. It has an initial capitalisation of 400 million yuan ($48 million). The new carrier is Beijing's latest step to overhaul an industry dominated for decades by national carrier China Telecom. On orders from government leaders, China Telecom has begun spinning off its mobile phone unit into a separate company, and has ceded its profitable paging operations to China Unicom, the country's much smaller number two carrier. But while China Unicom and China Telecom battle for traditional fixed-line and mobile markets, CNC is positioning itself to leapfrog both in an equally lucrative market: broadband data networks. ''CHERRY PICKING'' CORPORATE CUSTOMERS Tian played down the competitive threat CNC poses to China Telecom, saying he aimed simply to fill a niche as a wholesaler of broadband network capacity. Asked whether he risked stepping on toes at China Telecom, run by powerful industry regulators, Tian said carriers would be potential customers, not rivals. ''This market hasn't been addressed,'' he said. Not yet, perhaps, but analysts said China Telecom is scrambling to upgrade its networks to provide ISDN and other high-speed services to exactly the same customers CNC is eyeing. ''CNC has a licence to sell directly to individual consumers,'' said Jay Hu, head of the U.S. Information Technology Office in Beijing. ''They will cherry-pick from the most profitable markets -- national and global business accounts.'' Furthermore, CNC's superior network would allow them to provide services more cheaply than China Telecom, Hu said. Tian said multinational companies would be ''the major customer focus,'' followed by telephone companies, government offices, Internet service providers and high-income residents. In economic hotbeds like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, CNC will link corporate and government buildings directly to the IP backbone, he said. ''That's two to 10 megabytes to your desktop,'' he added -- enough to download video in real time. RUN LIKE A SILICON VALLEY COMPANY Analysts said CNC had solid government backing. Its investors include the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Railways, which has committed its own extensive networks. A fourth investor is a branch of the Shanghai city government supervised by President Jiang Zemin's son, analysts said. In addition to the original $48 million investment, the Ministry of Finance also issued 200 million yuan in 10-year bonds on behalf of the company, and state banks were competing to provide credit, Tian said. He forecast profits from the IP telephone service within six months and in two to three years from its core backbone-based services, which are scheduled to begin next year. The analysts said CNC's most valuable asset may be Tian. The 37-year-old Beijinger, who earned a doctorate in environmental studies in the United States, caught attention after he turned his homegrown Internet firm, AsiaInfo, into an $87 million-a-year company six years after founding it in 1993. He drove a tough bargain with CNC investors before agreeing in March to accept the new job. ''The condition was that they only got to hire one person: me,'' Tian said. With complete hiring power, he has offered meaty stock incentives to lure talented Chinese executives from Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news), Motorola (NYSE:MOT - news) and Marconi. ''Our shareholders are very supportive, and we have very good bylaws,'' he said. ''It's run just like a real Silicon Valley company,'' he said.