Millicom International Cellular S.A. signed a seven-year $200 million credit facility agreement arranged by ABN-AMRO Bank and ING Bank. Millicom said the facility will be used to refinance $125 million of existing short term credit facilities at the parent level and the balance of $75 million will be used for investments in existing and new joint ventures and for corporate and interest expenses.
China’s telecommunications market has become one of the largest in the world, says a recent report released by IGI Consulting Inc. of Boston. The study is the fourth in IGI’s series of China Telecom new reprints called Cellular and Paging Market Opportunities. IGI indicates the average growth rate in Chinese mobile network subscribers from 1988 to 1995 was 202 percent. A major milestone in the development of China’s mobile communications over the last year was the interconnection of Motorola Inc. and L.M. Ericsson’s Total Access Communications System 900 MHz cellular systems, IGI said. The Ericsson network covers 15 provinces and municipalities and the Motorola network covers 21.
Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom have completed the final installment in their investment in Sprint Corp. With the last installment of about $660 million, the two European telecommunications carriers have invested a total of $3.66 billion to acquire about 86 million shares of Sprint’s class A common stock, Sprint said. Sprint now has nearly 435 million shares outstanding. In January, Sprint, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom launched Global One, a global telecommunications venture. At that time, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom made their initial investment of $3 billion, with the remaining installment coming after the spinoff of Sprint’s cellular operation.
Motorola Inc.’s Advanced Messaging Group announced China Motion has signed a $3 million contract for Motorola’s FLEX protocol. The contract adds M15 paging infrastructure systems in Shenzhen and Guangzhou city and provides a cross-border roaming paging network for Hong Kong and Guangdong province. Motorola said the FLEX protocol-based systems increase total subscriber capacity by 500,000 in these markets. The paging systems are expected to be fully operational by mid-1996.
In its report, Mobile Communications in Europe 1996, CIT Research estimates mobile telephony revenues will change radically during the next two years as more consumers, rather than businesspeople, become the main users of mobile phones. The company said more than 24 million cellular phone subscribers in western Europe will use low call or personal tariff packages by 1997. Currently, 60 percent of western Europe’s 22 million mobile phone subscribers are on standard or business tariff packages.
