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

To: slacker711 who wrote (23571)	6/8/2002 4:50:41 PM
From: q1000	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 196584

Slacker, here are my Vesper notes from the November and January conference calls. The 420M figure was a January 21st number. Thus, it looks as if there were about 30M adds during the first quarter. With a lot of prepaids, however, there could have been some "scrubbing" of the older numbers as you suggest: Vesper - Brazil January 24th call Vesper has added 100,000 net subscribers since the November restructuring – all prepaid customers – and had 420,000 subscribers on January 21, 2002. Operating costs have been reduced and new services have been added. Vesper plans to have 1 million subscribers by the end of the year and to be EBITDA positive by the end of the year. November 8th call Qualcomm is the driving force in restructuring this investment. A new management team is in place. Vesper enjoys the largest CDMA footprint of any operator (mobile or fixed) in Brazil, the largest market in Latin America. Other operators have a mixture of TDMA and CDMA. Vesper has the largest CDMA footprint – over 1,000 base stations; 120 million pops are covered by licenses, including the 3 largest cities, but it has only 300,000 subs. Vesper is adding subscribers at an excellent clip – 2,000 per day. In August, Vesper received regulatory permission to use lower cost portable handsets and to offer limited mobility services; Vesper recently announced a new service. The enterprise value [this normally includes equity and debt] will be $5 per pop for Qualcomm’s investment. Thornley hopes Vesper will be able to obtain a mobile license after deregulation [rather than the wireless local loop license that I assume it has for the “limited mobility services”]. Thornley looks for an internal rate of return of 30% on Qualcomm’s investment in Vesper. Qualcomm plans to attract strategic investors into Vesper and then to spin off Qualcomm’s investment in Vesper “in the relatively near future in same manner as we did with Leap Wireless” [which was a dividend fully taxable as ordinary income].