BT sees S'pore as Asian telecom hub
BT sees S'pore as Asian telecom hub
SINGAPORE (Reuter): British Telecommunications Plc (BT) said
yesterday it aimed to turn Singapore into an Asian communications
hub if it and its partners won their bid for a license to operate
telephone services there from 2000.
BT's head of Asian corporate communications Martin O'Connor
said the company was still discussing with Japan's Nippon
Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT), Singapore Power and Singapore
Technologies Telemedia (STT) the terms of their bid for the
license, which was announced formally on March 13.
Singapore has said it will deregulate its domestic
telecommunications market from April 2000, granting one or two
new licenses to companies to compete directly with the current
local monopoly Singapore Telecommunications Ltd.
"If our bid goes ahead, we in BT are looking at turning
Singapore into a major strategic communications hub in Asia,"
O'Connor told Reuters in an interview.
He said the exact shares in the proposed Singapore venture had
yet to be decided though the two Singapore partners would hold a
majority stake between them.
"It is now for us to sort out how much we will need to invest
and it is far too early to discuss the value of the bid," he
said.
Analysts estimate the total Singapore telecommunications
market is worth between US$5.00-$5.60 billion per year but have
produced no consensus on how much of that business newcomers to
the market could hope to grab.
They believe any initial "serious" bid for a license would
probably be worth between $500 million and $1 billion.
BT's director of strategy and joint ventures for Asia, Mike
Burgess, told Reuters in an interview his company wanted to get
into the Singapore market because of its geographical position
and because of the high concentration of multinational companies
with headquarters in the island.
Singapore was at the center of the region's cable network and
this position would be reinforced over the next few years as the
world's longest and highest capacity submarine cable network, the
Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe network, came on
stream, he said.
"Singapore is a natural confluence for telecommunications,"
Burgess said.
Burgess said its partners in the Singapore venture all offered
special expertise. Singapore Power had an important customer base
as well as existing underground power networks while STT was a
leading technology company and NTT had a major foothold in the
Japanese market.
BT is currently merging with the second biggest U.S. telephone
company, MCI Communications Corp.
The merger, which will create Concert Plc, an Anglo-U.S.
telecoms giant with combined annual revenues of $42 billion, is
expected to be completed within the next six months.