apologies for not seeing this earlier - it's been going for a few days


Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa has put its UK mobile phone business 3 UK up for sale, according to sources in London late Tuesday evening. Goldman Sachs has been appointed advisor and an official announcement is expected to be made on Thursday, the source said

http://telecoms.com/itmgcontent/tcoms/requ...roducttype=news
[registration needed; so I can't see it myself]


Vodafone might be interested in buying them ...

"Any deals would have to pass Vodafone's financial criteria but Mr Sarin said the group would be interested in Hutchison Whampoa's mobile businesses in Italy and the UK if they were put up for sale."

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/...1114&ID=6198385


http://uk.techcrunch.com/2006/11/16/vodafone-to-buy-3/
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/...2453855,00.html


HUTCHISON WHAMPOA challenged Arun Sarin to put his money where his mouth is just days after the Vodafone chief executive signalled an interest in buying its European mobile assets.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/articl...2457453,00.html


I wonder how long their offer of international calls for from 0.5p will last ...

I never quite understood how, in any country larger than the Netherlands, a 3G-only carrier was going to be able to compete. It seemed to me, that the issue of coverage was going to be hard to get around.

Well yes, but they do also have 2g roaming on O2, soon to be replaced by a deal with Orange.

This incurs costs to them of course, which looked a bit odd when in the early days their early contracts had cheaper pro-rata per minute calls than any other network. I live just outside the 3g coverage, so some of my 500 minutes of calls a month for only ?15.88 a year (after cashback of line rental) must have been costing them money straight to O2.

They still have higher termination fees for received calls than the other networks, and I've seen these differentials described as effectively a subsidy (ie equal time of calls to and from 3 and another network results in a net transfer of funds)

At the moment they have a cheap international calls option on both contract and prepaid of ?15 a month for up to 3000 minutes fair use. Using callthrough in say USA, this could be used for UK landlines as well.

I'm quite surprised that Hutchison is putting their UK network up for sale....it makes you wonder whether their Sweden and Austria networks are still financially stable.

I think a bit more scepticism is warranted ...... maybe I should change the thread title

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/22/...son_Whampoa.php

but
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/hutc...B6F72A791AB3%7D

and
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail....2978&con_type=1


It sounds to me like both sides of the story are hoaxes!

.

Interesting but if all you want are cheap minuets and lots ofthem then three are the network for you! but i guess they have to recoup the large sums of money they spent for a 3g license!

Every UK network spent large sums of money on the 3g licence. I think the auction was designed by some very clever game theory consultants, and the method was then taken around the world

yeah...but come on there opening loads of new stores at the moment, if they where in a state of financial trouble then surely they would put a hold on this large spending of money!!!

This says expect an announcement by Friday

It might be going to the Chinese

http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/3075