Gedankenspiel - UMTS: ist eine Klage gegen Eichel moeglich? - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[guuruh]

Hier drei provokative Fragen. Insbesondere Nr 2 zu beachten.

Die Vergabe / Versteigerung der UMTS-Lizenzen hat der Rentenkasse
100 Mld auf Kosten der Anleger gebracht.

1. Warum der Rentenkasse und nicht den Nachkommen von Heinrich Hertz?

2. In anderen, auch Europäischen Länder waren die Lizenzen teilweise
oder völlig kostenfrei, also unter dem damaligen Marktwert, vergeben.
Es ist ein klarer Fall für den Europäischen Wettbewerbskommisar.

3. Ein Beitragzahler kann seine Beiträge in die Rentenkasse
zurückfordern, wenn er Deutschland verläßt und auf seine Rente verzichtet.
Eine rhetorische Frage: Kann es auch ein ehem. UMTS-Investor,
wenn er nicht vorhat, aus dem Rententopf hierzulande zu schöpfen?

cheers, guuruh

[hcpzuhoch]

klar iist: der eichel und der schröder haben unser geld aus der versteigerung
und sommer und genossen waren willfährig

klar ist weiter,dass dies zu einem guten teil an der miesere der finanzmärkte schuld ist

nur: WARUM SAGT DAS KEINER ENDLICH MAL DEUTLICHST!!!!!!!!

das verbraten sie nicht etwa nur inder rentenkasse, sonder zum großteil mit der ausgabe von beamtenpensionen und politikerdiäten

und zu guter letzt noch für aufwendigsten aufmarsch von steuerfahndungstruppen bei acg, wodurch wieder binn3en 1 tag
200 mio euro vernichtet wurden

das dar alles nicht mehr wahr sein--bananrepublikanischer selbstbedienungsladen

[Ken_meyer]

Provokative Fragen? Rhetorische Fragen!

Das sklerotisch-sozialistische Europa als GANZES hat
in überheblicher Manier seinen letzten Trumpf gegenüber
dem Rest der Welt verspielt; alle, Politik und Wirtschaft
und Gesellschaft waren gleichermassen beteiligt - und, offen gesagt, ich kann meine klammheimliche Schadenfreude darüber
nicht verbergen. Das ist die einzige Rendite, die bleibt.

Ich hab mir im letzten Sommer an den Kopf gelangt; dass unser Deutsch-Pauker Null Ahnung von VWL hat, nun ja; aber
dass er die Chuzpe hat, in einer "Nach-mir-die Sintflut"-
Manier eine massive Steuer auf die nachfolgende Generation
zu erheben, schreit eigentlich nach Verknastung ...

The Winner takes it all. In diesem Sinne, der nachfolgende
Artikel.

ARE
THE EUROPEAN TELECOM NETWORKS ABOUT TO BE RENDERED OBSOLETE?
 3
April 2001   
By Marshall Auerback
"The outstanding fact is the extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made. Our knowledge of
factors which will govern the yield of an investment some years hence is usually very
slight and often negligible. If we speak frankly, we have to admit that our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield ten years hence of a railway, a copper mine, a textile
factory…amount to little and sometimes to nothing…" –John Maynard
Keynes, Ch. 12, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
Nowhere has "the extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made" been more vividly
illustrated than last year’s pan-European third generation mobile phone auctions.
Judging from the collapse in most telecoms’ lofty valuations over the past year, it
has become manifestly clear that the market is no longer enamoured with these companies.
Looking back, it is clear that the UK third generation mobile auction marked the beginning
of the end of this particular episode of financial euphoria. Once surprisingly large sums
were actually forked out for the licence to develop these 3G networks, analysts were able
to put pencil to paper and calculate the underlying costs to the companies concerned. The
fantasy subsequently metamorphosed into a bleak and uneconomic future. As Marco Fasoli, managing director of Broadview International, a firm of technological acquisition
advisors, noted, "The sector is suffering from a severe lack of positive news –
3G is like a black box: nobody knows how it is going to pan out in terms of what services
are going to be delivered." Nor does any company yet know the ultimate costs
involved, nor the revenues to be generated.
And now comes the most potentially damaging revelation of all: the 3G technology adopted by the European operators itself may ultimately prove to be irrelevant
as it is surpassed by more cost effective alternatives, even though the standard itself is
widely viewed by experts as technically superior to other alternatives (then again, so was
Sony’s betamax in relation to the VHS standard). Financing constraints and collapsing markets have threatened to delay the construction of the third generation networks. But
the world of mobile telephony has not stood still whilst companies such as Vodaphone, BT,
France Telecom and others began to contemplate how on earth they were going to finance
these expensive networks. The largest Japanese mobile operator, DoCoMo, is moving on with
a competitive version of 3G services, as are American operators such as Verizon, Sprint
and Qualcomm. The 3G auctions might as a consequence turn out to be one of the greatest
and most wasteful misallocations of capital ever.
One would have thought that criticism of the vast sums committed in the wake of the UK auction would have made the telecom companies more circumspect post the
event, but the subsequent German auction clearly demonstrated that this was not the case.
And now the final tally for this strategy of madly bidding for licences all across the
continent is in: about 130 billion euros was spent on licences, and a comparable sum is
the latest estimate of the amount required actually to build the third generation network.

The mea culpa’s have also started: Sir Peter Bonfield, chief
executive of British Telecommunications, Britain’s "Ma Bell", has recently
admitted that his company spent around £10 ($14.2bn) billion too much on acquiring the
licences for the next generation of mobile phones. This overspend represents about
one-third of BT’s now precarious debt burden. The group’s finance chief has
added further fuel to the fire by conceding to a group of investors present at a private
dinner that there had been a "lack of financial discipline" at BT that led to
acquisitions being made for reasons of "pride".
And what has been the effect of this lack of financial discipline? Well,
let’s take a look specifically at British Telecom, whose experience is broadly representative of the companies now in this predicament. From July 1999, the company
bought Securicor’s stake in Cellnet. Once becoming a player in the mobile telecom
world, BT’s subsequent purchases seemed to be more driven by broker hype about the
lucrative future growth prospects in this area, rather than hard, business logic. It
purchased a minority stake in Japan Telecom, which is looking increasingly irrelevant,
given the larger presence in JT of BT’s cellular competitor, Vodaphone, which is clearly exploiting BT’s balance sheet weakness to push the latter to the fringe of
influence. BT then spent £4 billion on a licence for a 3G licence in Britain. Most
expensively, the company laid out more than £5.6 billion for a major stake in Viag
Interkom, a German mobile business; the total cost of this investment grew to £12 billion
once Viag secured an expensive 3G licence for Germany.
The upshot of this shopping spree was that within 18 months, BT’s net debt position grew from a mere £3.84 billion to the current £30 billion ($42.6bn). Not a
good position for a company with annual revenues of around £22 billion. The tumbling
market valuations for mobile-phone companies are now making it impossible for the company
to finance this debt via the floatation of BT Wireless, its mobile phone arm. Furthermore, British Telecom is so obviously a distressed seller of its other non-core assets that it
is finding it virtually impossible to secure decent prices in the event of trade sales. If
the 3G auctions do not count as the most vivid manifestation of this corporate pride,
it’s hard to see what does. And these difficulties are not unique to BT: the
increasingly well documented funding difficulties now being experienced by all telecom
companies, coupled with teething problems associated with the technology itself, likely
means substantial delays by as much as three years in terms of making the network
operational. British Telecom might be the most extreme manifestation, but it is by no
means unique. France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, KPN, and Telekom Austria all suffer under comparable debt burdens, although (ironic in the privatisation era), the continued
existence of a substantial public stake in these companies, renders them less vulnerable
to the dangers of default. If worse comes to worst in the latter cases, the taxpayer can
always be prevailed upon.
Why do all of these problems matter? It matters because American and Japanese companies today can already demonstrate a working 3G system, CDMA2000, which
works on a different standard than the anticipated European UMTS system. The latter UMTS
system is deemed to be technically superior, since it employs a full 5MHz carrier as
opposed to slices of 1.25Mhz (as in CDMA2000), and therefore will be a much more effective
technology in the steady state (say 2005-2010). In addition, it has received far greater
industry backing than CDMA2000, in large a part because of Qualcomm`s past behaviour
through exorbitant patent fees for use of CDMAOne. But the one thing Qualcomm’s
systems does offer is the ease of migration from CDMAOne, which is a very important consideration, given the ongoing teething problems now being experienced by the European
standard, and the corresponding need for these telecom companies to get the new services
up and running as quickly as possible. For this reason, Sprint,Verizon, KDDI, etc., have
all expressed support for the technically inferior American standard. Marketing
considerations may prove more important than the technical merits of one system over another. If Qualcomm’s system does gain a greater foothold in the global
market, this opens up the possibility of a whole new range of technologies superseding the
current standard on which Europe’s mobile phone operators have already placed their
big bets, which in turn places the billions of pounds laid out for this investment
uneconomic and unrecoverable in full by their lenders. And that obviously has credit implications for the banks which have lent all of this money to the European companies and
therefore face the prospect of write-offs. Furthermore, as Alan Cane wrote in last
week’s Financial Times, "Europe’s leadership [in mobile telephony] may
not… survive the move to the next generation of mobile phone technology. The efforts
of regulators, vendors and operators to ensure Europe stays ahead of the pack as the world
moves to third-generation (3G) services could inadvertently cost it its dominance".
The sheer costs involved in establishing the 3G network are enormous and time-consuming
and the very rapidity with which technology has evolved in this area implies that European
companies such as Vodaphone, Nokia, France Telecom, BT might once again be on the outside
looking in, as US and Japanese companies reclaim their position as the leaders in this
valuable technology.
The first sign of this new threat to Europe comes from a wireless technology clumsily christened "802.11". With data speeds of up to 11 megabits
per second, the technology works up to 200 times faster than conventional dial-up modems
– and significantly faster that the promised speed of 3G services. More ominously
from the perspective of the European operators, instead of requiring costly new mobile
networks, this technology can work from base-station transmitters for the home that cost a
mere £170 ($250) to buy. To be sure, the technology does have its limitations. Per
Lindberg of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein notes that 802.11 allows for comparatively
limited mobility and thus lends itself only for hot-spot areas such as airports, shopping
malls, conference centres, etc. Nevertheless, as anyone who has spent time at an airport
or mall recently can readily testify, a huge number of people make significant use of
their cell phones in these venues and therefore could easily take advantage of this new
technology at a vastly reduced rate. However limited, 802.11 does represent another nail
in the coffin of revenue projections used to justify the enormous sums laid out to capture
the 3G licences in the first place. Many winners in the UK and German auctions conceded
that they came close to overpaying, but were still able to make their sums work. This was
before the advent of the newer, cheaper technologies, which have now rendered their
respective margins for success that much narrower. If nothing else, 802.11 does create
additional pricing pressures for the UMTS system, implying further margin deterioration in
what was only recently deemed a hugely profitable, high growth business area for Europe.
Of the 700 million cellular subscribers worldwide, more than two-thirds now use the Global System for Mobile Telephony (GSM) created and nurtured in Europe. That
Europe had established a de facto dominant standard was viewed as the continent’s
proudest technological boast. GSM was a symbol that Europe had shed its socialistic,
sclerotic traditions, and was now matching the United States and Japan step for step in
high tech entrepreneurial achievement. But with this success came hubris: One of the
crucial assumptions used to justify the huge sums expended on the new 3G licences was that
the successor to the existing GSM standard, the so-called Universal Mobile Telephone
System (UMTS), would again prevail over its American and Japanese counterparts and indeed,
that large sums of money had to be expended in order to ensure this outcome for the
European operators and their governments. The key variable to consolidate this lead,
however, was a quick launch of the next generation of services. This was deemed essential
despite the fact that (in the words of a recent European Commission report) "product
development for 3G terminals has not in the main progressed beyond prototyping, pending
verification of key applications which these handsets need to serve." Quite a huge
sum of money to spend on a technology that still poses significant technological challenges.
Meanwhile, the competition has moved rapidly to undermine European leadership in this area. Qualcomm recently acquired a 3rd generation licence in
Australia and pointedly noted that it would employ a very different standard to the
European specification. Qualcomm has been developing this standard, the so-called CDMA
2000 for many years. This standard has been adopted by operators in the US, including
Sprint PCS, Japan, and South Korea. More problematic from the perspective of the European
operators is that this move by Qualcomm hugely complicates their attempts to establish a
cost-effective entry into the US market. Of particular note is British mobile telecom
giant, Vodaphone, which owns a 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless. But Verizon
Wireless’s parent, Verizon, parent has already indicated enthusiasm for the Qualcomm system. The two companies, therefore, are now at odds over using a third generation
technology that is incompatible with the European standard, since Verizon Wireless
announced plans to incorporate the Qualcomm system in the US, rather than the UMTS
standard employed by Vodaphone’s other overseas’ networks. Not only would this
make it virtually impossible for Vodaphone’s main European subscribers to use the
same phone on both sides of the Atlantic (a problem that has only recently been resolved
with earlier generations of mobile phones), but also the strategy poses huge risks to
Vodaphone’s overall global strategy. Although not as debt-ridden as BT, the inability
to establish a cost-effective entry into the US market does complicate Vodaphone’s attempts to secure a dominant global franchise, and readily service its debt requirements
in a cost effective manner.
It does seem ridiculous that the mobile companies were not able to work out in advance a uniform global standard, which would have saved billions in investment,
but obviously political considerations came to the fore, as all regional blocs saw huge
potential benefits to be derived from developed a separate standard that ultimately became
the de facto global standard. But consider the costs now from Europe’s perspective.
Instead of agreeing a common standard, huge amounts were spent to secure licences for a
new frequency; new, expensive networks of base-stations will have to be built at a time
when a number of local government authorities are introducing planning permission laws to
restrict establishment of the new masts. Given the financing constraints now established
by market conditions, the technology might not be developed on time, which further risks
rendering the European standard on the outer fringe (and, by extension the companies
themselves), significantly lengthening the odds of any of the companies committed to the
scheme of ever generating adequate returns to service huge sums of debt incurred on an
increasingly ephemeral promise based on a highly dubious technology.
Which ultimately means that the banks get left holding the burden. This is a classic illustration of the Keynesian observation to the effect that changes induced by
disequilibrium in a particular market may have their major effect upon the initially
affected market by first affecting conditions in other markets; that is, the reaction to a
disequilibrium in one market may induce disequilibria in other markets. Losses have now
been taken on loans to telecom companies, and we envisage that the pace of write-offs will
accelerate if, as we suspect, the pace of technological change, coupled with current
financing constraints, ultimately renders many of these mobile telephony businesses
economically unviable. The consequent losses and corresponding write-offs are already
beginning to change the risk behaviour of the creditors. The drive to expand the loan book
is being replaced by a cautious assessment of the loans already on the books. The marginal
loan that would have been made ceases to be made in the future, and this adversely impacts
on general economic activity. Weaker economic activity lowers cash flows and debt service coverage, thereby validating higher risk premiums and lower prices on sub-prime debt
securities. This process is now well underway in the capital markets and we expect it to
accelerate in the months ahead, despite Wall Street’s increasingly Pollyanna-like
forecasts to the contrary.
The inescapable question following each episode of financial euphoria echoes down through the years: what on earth induced such apparently irrational and
irresponsible behaviour on the part of the economic agents concerned? In the specific
instance of telecoms, how could the prices paid for these 3G licences ever have seemed
reasonable, given the uncertainty of the technology concerned and the increasing
possibility of its rapid obsolescence? It is worthwhile examining this issue in greater
detail, as what remains to a great extent unexplored in conventional depictions of financial manias is the extraordinary dilemma faced by economic agents in the midst of a
bubble. The law of the competitive jungle assures that those who fail to adopt
bubble-chasing behaviour will soon find themselves culled from the thundering herd, which
explains why these companies kept madly bidding ahead, even as the market began to signal
its disquiet with the process. There was clearly a catch-22 situation at work: failure to
bid for these licences risked placing the companies at the fringes of a rapidly growing
industry, whilst their success in securing the very same licences has placed their future
financial viability at great risk. The consequences of this apparently untenable position
was recently summed up by a senior European telecoms executive: "I fear the European
side of this industry is in for a protracted business winter because of the misguided
manoeuvres by regulators, vendors, and operators to dominate the wireless marketplace." And that is something that will ultimately affect all of us the next
time we approach our bank manager for a quick and easy loan.

Quelle: http://www.prudentbear.com/international.htm