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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Voltaire who wrote (50504)	11/16/1999 11:00:00 PM
From: CDMQ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Qualcomm to buy stake in S. Korea firm By Brian E. Clark STAFF WRITER November 16, 1999 Qualcomm announced yesterday that it will invest more than $200 million in Korea Telecom Freetel, one of the world's fastest growing phone companies. Other players in the $600 million deal are Microsoft and Canada's Capital Communications. The three firms will equally divide 9.2 percent of KT Freetel and help the mobile unit of Korea's biggest phone company break into that nation's rapidly expanding Internet business. The transaction is expected to close later this month. Sang-Chul Lee, KT Freetel's president and CEO, said his company will not only focus on the Internet and wireless-data business, but that the deal will help his firm expand into other countries and become a "leading global player." South Korea, with a population of 46 million, already has 7.2 million Internet users and the market is growing by 30 percent a year, according to a Merrill Lynch & Co. estimate. Irwin M. Jacobs, Qualcomm's CEO and chairman, said KT Freetel is expected to deploy his company's High Data Rate technology in its major markets during 2001, after the completion of technical and marketing trials. In the United States, Sprint and U S West recently ran HDR tests of their own, said Qualcomm spokeswoman Christine Trimble. But American consumers also will have to wait 18 months more to use the high-speed technology, she said. Jacobs said he believes the "opportunity for cellular carriers around the world to provide cost-effective, high-speed wireless Internet access is extraordinary." A spokesman for KT Freetel said the agreement represents the biggest foreign investment yet in a mobile-phone business in Korea, where almost half the adult population owns cell phones. Suh Sung Won, head of the Asia technology research team at SG Securities, said Korea has an excellent infrastructure for Internet-related businesses and "huge potential" for explosive growth in the future. For example, Korea's PC penetration rate -- the percentage of households with a personal computer -- is 38 percent, the second highest in Asia after Japan, which rates 41 percent, according to figures from U.S. market research firm Dataquest. PC penetration levels in other Asian nations are about 30 percent or less. "Given the pace, the number of Internet users in Korea will double by the end of 2002," Won said. Copyright 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.