Telcoflash: Telecom Market News

Telefonica has spent about €8bn in capex in 2006, up 10% on forecast capex of €7.2bn, and +50% on 2005 figure. Growth was driven by strong broadband and mobile demand. 2006 sales are expected to rise over 37%. Hamadou Toure does not intend to reinforce...

China Netcom will sell its telecom assets in Shanghai and Guangdong Telecom to its parent company for $450m. Verizon Comms. has spun off its local access business in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, and merge the business with PairPoint. Ertach (Argentina...

With 23m subscribers and a network capacity of 24m lines, and orders for additional 45m lines delayed by court decision following Motorola petition (see Telcoflash N133), BSNL (India) is experiencing a tough time in the race against Reliance, Hutchison...

In Mexico, the number of internet users reached 20.5m at the end of 2006. MTS (Russia) rises its subscriber base to 72.9m at the enf of Dec. 06. Telefónica (World) says it had 7.3m broadband customers at the end of September 2006, of which 3.4m in Spain....

Fastweb (Italy) reports 4Q06 revenues up 26% to €362m, and an EBITDA of €127m.

Sprint Nextel appoints Jack Dziak as new strategy VP. Dziak will report to CEO Gary Forsee and assume responsability for driving the 3-year strategic plan. It will replace Atish Gube who is moving to senoir VP of mobile broadband operations. Sonus has...

There are “strategic” moves that can be easily reversed, but are they strategic? For months, DT voiced it would deploy a VSDL high-speed, strategic network across Germany in main 50 cities at a cost of about €3.3bn. The boss changed in November and the...

According to Strategy Analytics the microSD memory card format has become the leading memory technology for mobile handsets in 2006 with 65% market share (vs 21% in 2005), at the expense of the MMC format that has lost support from nearly all mobile phone...

A few set of market information released this week: According to Fevad, e-commerce in France rose 40% in 2006 to €12bn; according to ComScore, e-commerce in the USA rose 24% to $102bn, of which 25% in 4Q06. According to In-Stat, there were 76,000 voice...

Avaya will buy Ubiquity, a company focused on software for SIP-based applications development, for $144m. Arris is offering $1.2bn in cash (83%) and stock (17%) for video encoding expert Tandberg TV. It is buying its way into the video processing and...