To: wlheatmoon who wrote (1197 ) 6/4/2000 5:26:00 PM From: John Pitera Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 2850
It looks like China Unicom wants to stay their current consortium. This is certainly a setback for QCOM it appears. maybe there is something to the Forbes article from 2 months ago about the coming next generation European standard initiative spearheaded by NOK, ERICY, Seimman's etc??? Here's the FT story....this seems to be where some of this news broke. ----------- China Unicom to scrap mobile plan By James Kynge in Beijing Published: June 4 2000 16:54GMT | Last Updated: June 4 2000 19:52GMT China Unicom, the Chinese telecoms company hoping to list this month, has scrapped plans to build a CDMA network - marking a setback for Qualcomm, a US company, that holds most of the intellectual property rights in CDMA technology. The official China Daily newspaper quoted a senior Unicom official on Sunday as saying that the company had no intention of deploying the current generation of CDMA technology. It had planned to start rolling out a nationwide mobile network with a designed capacity of 50m lines this year, requiring an investment of more than Rmb100bn ($12bn). The senior Unicom official was quoted as holding out some hope that the company would roll out a third generation network based on CDMA 2000, a US technology developed by Qualcomm. But the official noted that CDMA 2000 would not be ready for commercial rollout before around 2003. Telecommications analysts said that Unicom's history of broken promises undermined the credibility of future statements of intent. The company this year wound down some 46 co-operative telecoms services ventures with foreign companies. Compensation given to the foreign partners in the majority of cases fell short of the amounts invested. Unicom's current 7m subscribers use the GSM standard, supplied by Nokia, Ericsson and a few local Chinese companies. Chinese state researchers are already working with European companies to familiarise themselves with third generation GSM technology, which is called WCDMA. In addition, both Unicom and China Telecom, the dominant state carrier, have given a verbal endorsement to China's own third generation standard, called TD-SCDMA. The big carriers have not made public statements on procurement plans for this home-grown standard, which is expected to be inter-operable with WCDMA and CDMA 2000. The decision to drop the CDMA rollout plans are unlikely to influence the popularity of Unicom's share offer directly. The flotation of 2.459bn shares is expected to raise US$4.1bn at the mid-point price of HK$13 (US$1.67) and rank as Asia's biggest offering this year. The company's duopolistic position in the world's fastest growing mobile market should ensure keen interest despite the company's chequered history, poor management and its opaque relationship with the ministry of information industry, China's telecoms regulator. Nevertheless, margins are set to drop in both fixed and mobile services, analysts said. China Telecom said last week that it would cut its high international call rates in the second half of this year, but not by the 50 per cent margin reported in the official Chinese media. As in many other countries, the cuts are being driven by competition. Unicom began offering a long distance service this year at a cheaper rate than China Telecom. Increasingly popular call back services and internet telephony services are also contributing to an increasingly competitive environment.