NEW YORK-In a very successful initial public offering, Deutsche Telekom AG, the German government’s telecommunications monopoly, went public Nov. 18.
The IPO consisted of 600 million shares sold to outsiders and another 23 million to Deutsche Telekom employees. The total number of shares offered for sale was considerably larger than the 500 million envisioned just two weeks before the sale, which was lead managed by Goldman, Sachs & Co., New York.
In the United States, investors purchased 85 million shares of the offering in the form of American Depository Shares, each of which equals one share of common stock.
However, even after the IPO-the largest yet in Europe-the German government still owns an 80 percent stake in the newly privatized and publicly traded company.
In anticipation of its initial public offering, Deutsche Telekom made its wireless telecommunications division economically independent three years ago. Deutsche Telekom MobilNet GmbH, or T-Mobil, operates two cellular networks serving 2.5 million customers, three brands of paging service with 1 million customers, as well as mobile radio data systems and satellite communications. “T-Mobil was the first part of the company to prove we could compete,” said Katrin Weber, a company spokesman.
A week before Deutsche Telekom went public, it announced it had signed a partnership agreement with Technology Resources Industries Berhad.
Through its wholly owned subsidiary, Cellular Communications Network, TRI provides wireless telephone services to 783,000 customers in Malaysia, according to Deutsche Telekom. Celcom also holds licenses for fixed network, international gateway, Global System for Mobile communications, paging and value-added services.
Through its T-Mobil subsidiary, Deutsche Telekom already has holdings in Indonesia, in several countries that formerly were a part of the Soviet Union, as well as in five European countries other than Germany.
