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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Drew Williams who wrote (10377)	4/30/2001 4:51:17 PM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197054

he Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- May 1, 2001 Tech Center China Unicom Delays Plans to Award Contracts to CDMA-Gear Suppliers By MATT POTTINGER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HONG KONG -- China Unicom Group has postponed signing contracts to purchase roughly US$1.7 billion of CDMA wireless equipment from Motorola Inc., Lucent Technologies Inc. and other vendors, but didn't offer reasons for the holdup or say how long it would last. Executives with Chinese and foreign equipment suppliers said state phone operator China Unicom called their offices Friday to inform them that contract signings scheduled to take place over the weekend would be delayed until further notice. "No particular reason" was given for the postponement, said Sonia Kim, spokeswoman for Samsung Electronics Co. in Seoul. Samsung is among 10 foreign and domestic equipment makers who received word from Unicom last week that they had won bids to help build a nationwide mobile-phone network in China running on the CDMA standard. The combined deals would mark one of the largest single outlays for equipment by a Chinese state-owned company, and would boost the fortunes of San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc., which stands to earn royalties on sales of CDMA, or code division multiple access, gear. Of six Chinese and foreign telecommunications companies reached by the Asian Wall Street Journal on Monday, an executive at one said he had received private assurance from a senior Unicom official that the delay was "a simple procedural issue," and that China's State Council, or cabinet, wanted to vet the final monetary figure for the deal. Executives at the other companies, however, said they received no such assurances, and several expressed fears that the deals may have become snarled in testy relations between Washington and Beijing. With China launching into a weeklong national holiday for Labor Day Tuesday, executives said they would be left on edge until Unicom and government officials returned from vacations and clarified the delay. Unicom executives in Beijing and Hong Kong couldn't be reached for comment Monday. To be sure, it isn't unusual in China for large deals to be delayed while state planners digest the political and economic ramifications. In some cases, concrete explanations are never offered for months-long delays. If politics is to blame for the latest delay, it wouldn't be the first time the CDMA issue has been embroiled in the volatile Sino-U.S. relationship. In May 1999, after U.S. warplanes dropped bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's air campaign over Yugoslavia, CDMA contract negotiations between China Unicom and foreign vendors were shelved for six months, although no explicit reason was given. The technology was also featured in the context of bilateral negotiations toward China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Lee Boam, a senior U.S. diplomat in Beijing, said it was much too early to make a correlation between recent relations and the Unicom deal. However, Mr. Boam, minister-counselor for commercial affairs at the U.S. Embassy, said he has received anxious calls from a few of the bidding companies. "There's no first-hand information we can generate from anybody saying these contracts aren't going to be signed," he said. "The fact things don't run like clockwork at the signing stage is not something that is getting us panicky at the current time." Of the companies China Unicom last week said it would award contracts to, only Lucent and Motorola are based in the U.S. Besides South Korea's Samsung, others include Nortel Networks Corp. of Canada; Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson of Sweden; and Alcatel SA of France, which owns part of the joint venture Shanghai Bell. Chinese companies include Huawei Technologies Co., Shenzhen Zhongxing Telecom Co., Guangzhou Jinpeng Group Co. and Datang Telecom Technology Co., according to Unicom. -- Suh Hae-sung of Dow Jones Newswires in Seoul contributed to this article. Write to Matt Pottinger at matt.pottinger@awsj.com .

To: Drew Williams who wrote (10377)	4/30/2001 4:57:43 PM
From: phatbstrd	Respond to of 197054

A quantum leap in technology is adding to the uncertainty. This year the wireless industry starts its migration from a largely voice-driven digital technology to general packet radio service (called 2.5G or GPRS), which will allow data like e-mail and games to come through the mobile phone at 144 kilobits a second. This is a radio version of the technology that made the Internet a success: once again the speed is identical to 1x?

To: Drew Williams who wrote (10377)	5/2/2001 10:00:18 AM
From: David E. Taylor	Respond to of 197054

Drew: I read that interesting article in the print edition of Forbes over the weekend. Amongst other things, this bit caught my eye: The real battle in handset manufacturing, however, is taking place across the globe in China, where there were 85 million mobile subscribers last year and the market continues to grow at a 50% rate. The Russian-hardened Finns have built Nokia's China sales to $2.8 billion, boosting the country's exports by $1.5 billion and turning the company into a favorite of the communists. Nokia recently managed to get a seat on each of the country's six major wireless technology standards boards. Its biggest rival is Motorola; the American and Finnish firms each have an estimated 30% of the local handset market. By the end of this year three of Nokia's nine major plants around the world will be in China. The flagship will be a 360,000-square-foot plant in Beijing's Xingwang (International) Industrial Park near the main airport, where a massive steel frame the size of John F. Kennedy International Airport is going up in ragweed and frozen mud. Nokia won't disclose the new plant's production capacity, which comes on-line in the second half of this year, but clearly it's going to be a monster. The key factor is the tight circle around the plant, where 12 of Nokia's 20 major component suppliers, such as IBM and Sanyo, are setting up in a $1.2 billion first-phase development expected to finish next year. Nokia claims it can offset any drop in handset sales this year by better controlling the 250 million components it assembles each day, and behind both this remark and the Beijing plant is an Ollila-drive to build phones on "zero" inventory. "The whole idea behind Xingwang is to have next-door service," says Antti Ware, vice president of Nokia (China) Investment Co. "Ollila's idea is this ‘zero' inventory target, but not just at Nokia. There's no point transferring your inventory to your suppliers because they will then have the inventory costs and you will see it showing up in your component prices. But if you can reduce the whole chain's inventory, then you will be very competitive." Nokia isn't making this kind of large scale manufacturing capacity investment in China, and the Chinese government isn't letting them do it, for nothing. Looks like these facilities will ensure that Nokia will continue to be a major force in the Chinese domestic market as well as lowering their overall manufacturing costs for markets outside of China. Plus they've bought themselves a say in how future wireless standards are developed and implemented. David T.