HUTCHINSON WHAMPOA 51%an Andala übernommen! Tschüß Telekom - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[SCIQUEST]

UMTS: Hutchison Whampoa schlägt Telekom in Italien


Der Mischkonzern Hutchison Whampoa hat die Mehrheit beim italienischen UMTS-Bieterkonsortium Andala übernommen und damit einen möglichen Einstieg der Deutschen Telekom (mehr dazu hier) verhindert. Wie Hutchison am Montag in Hongkong offiziell mitteilte, erwarb das Unternehmen 51 Prozent an Andala. Nächstgrößter Anteilseigner ist der italienische Internetanbieter Tiscali mit 25,5 Prozent.

Andala ist eine der Bietergemeinschaften, die sich um die fünf italienischen UMTS-Mobilfunklizenzen bewirbt. Das Konsortium wird vom früheren Chef der Telecom Italia (TI), Franco Bernabé, geleitet. Ein Fusionsplan der deutschen Telekom mit TI war im letzten Jahr gescheitert.

[valueinvestor]

in zwei jahren verkauft mr li dann wieder mit 300% gewinn an ron; so wie bei voicestream!!

[valueinvestor]

in zwei jahren verkauft mr li dann wieder mit 300% gewinn an ron; so wie bei voicestream!!

[somers]

Aus Asiaweek...

Knowing When to Say No
Li refuses to succumb to mobile phone bidding mania
By ASSIF SHAMEEN and YULANDA CHUNG Hong Kong

Canning Fok Kin-ning, Hutchison Whampoa`s managing director, was given the task of delivering the disappointing news to the company`s European team that had helped craft a winning $7.6 billion offer for a third-generation mobile phone license in Germany. The boss, Li Ka-shing, didn`t like the price. Less than seven hours after the company had made its successful bid in partnership with KPN Mobile of the Netherlands and Japan`s NTT DoCoMo, among others, Li pulled out.

At first, the market reacted badly. In Hong Kong trading Friday, just after Hutchison`s announcement, the stock price fell 3.8%. How would the company achieve its goal of establishing a Europe-wide mobile network without a German license? But then reality set in. Li was rejecting the bid because the price was simply too dear given the number of winners — six, including the Hutchison consortium. And few businessmen in the world have more credibility than Li these days when it comes to valuing deals. Suddenly Li was on the right side of the bidding for a piece of the German cellular market — the sidelines.

It was classic Li. "What you`ve witnessed is that Hutch is the most savvy investor in town," says Anil Daswani, a telecom analyst at Salomon Smith Barney in Hong Kong. Pay attention to the emphasis. The decision to back away from the German license had little to do with business strategy or market strength or creating a regional mobile phone power. It was all about what Li Ka-shing does best: make money. And from that vantage, it was not a good deal.

The company`s interim financial results, announced a few days later, vindicated Li`s decision-making ability. Hutchison reported record profits for the period of $4 billion despite making provisions of nearly the same amount for a paper loss on stock holdings in Vodafone that could easily turn around in the next six months.

The German bidding had actually gone on for two weeks before it was settled, and some analysts suggested that the bidding companies had lost their perspective in the heat of battle. In the end, the winning groups bid a total of $46 billion for pieces of Germany`s radio spectrum. The airspace will allow the companies to offer the next generation of mobile phone services, known as 3G, including wireless broadband connections to the Internet. Just weeks earlier in the United Kingdom, Hutchison had successfully bid $6.6 billion for a 3G license. Based on a measure of how much the bidders paid for a given piece of radio spectrum per capita, analysts calculated that the German licenses were actually about 40% more expensive than the British ones.

A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom, one of the winning bidders, said the price of a winning bid was "economically insane." Rating agency Standard & Poor`s had placed Hutchison`s debt grade of single A on a credit watch for a possible reduction after the U.K. auction. But after the company pulled out of Germany, S&P reversed itself: "We believe these changes demonstrate good financial discipline," said the rating company in a statement. John Ure, director of Telecommunications Research Project at the University of Hong Kong, told Asiaweek that he also thought Hutchison had done the right thing: "I don`t see the business rationale for auction prices at that level."

Ure is one of the few people who think Hutchison may have a problem affording a Europe-wide mobile network. In fact, the company is loaded these days thanks to a series of deals involving its former U.K. cellular company, Orange. Hutchison had invested $1.1 billion in Orange back in 1994. Late last year the telco was bought by a German conglomerate, Mannesman, which netted Hutchison $15 billion in cash and stock. Soon after, Orange moved on to a British firm called Vodafone in a stock swap with Mannesman that could earn Li an additional $8 billion if the Vodafone share price ever returns to its highs of early this year. Meantime, Hutchison and Li stand to make another windfall if a deal to sell VoiceStream, a U.S. cellular company, to Germany`s Deutsche Telekom goes through. Li invested $950 million in VoiceStream 20 months ago; the deal with Deutsche Telekom is likely to earn a profit of at least $7.5 billion. Hutchison has said it has a cash hoard of nearly $13 billion.

If there was anything at all unusual about Li`s decision to reject the Germany deal, it was how he overrode his European team. Almost from the time he bought 26% of Hutchison from Hongkong Bank (now HSBC) in 1979 (the ownership now is 49.9%), Li has relied heavily on the expertise of outsiders to run the company. In the 1980s it was Simon Murray, a Scottish former French Foreign Legionnaire, who shaped Hutchison while Li focused on his flagship property company Cheung Kong. Murray revamped what had been one of Hong Kong`s original British hongs, and under his direction Hutchison concentrated on ports and infrastructure development, and it began to get into telecommunications. Meanwhile it sold less-profitable units to the other hongs, especially Inchcape.

Time has proven the wisdom of the strategy. While the other hongs have sometimes struggled to grow profits, Hutchison has soared. The ride has not always been smooth — the company lost close to a half-billion dollars when it invested in Rabbit, a U.K.-based, early-generation cellular service, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Recently, Li has warned to expect further mistakes because, quite simply, Hutchison cannot continue to unfailingly pick huge winners. He is not talking about Germany. Li and his current first deputy, Fok, undoubtedly believe that a future shakeout among the 3G competitors there will eventually yield good deals to anyone still standing and able to pick up the pieces. "We do not for a moment concede that we will be out of Germany," says Fok. "But we will have to be more creative. To throw money around is not the way." Arthur Law, an analyst at Core Pacific Yamaichi in Hong Kong, says Hutchison will be at a disadvantage in Germany against the actual bid-winners on price because they`ll be able to discount heavily and Li`s company will not.

Auctions of the mobile phone spectrum underway in Italy and coming up in Belgium, Switzerland and Sweden should reveal better what the company`s European strategy is going forward. It may not be such a mystery. Hutchison and Li are quite clearly in the asset-trading business today. If building a European mobile phone network seems like a good means to build value, that`s what will happen. But such a network, it now seems clear, has never been the final goal.