Telcoflash: Telecom Market News

China Mobile said it is mulling buying minority stakes in foreign telecom companies in emerging markets. It also plans to provide 15,000 3G TD-SCDMA handsets to the Beijing Olympics organization committee during the Games. It plans to create a new unit...

KDDI (Japan) lowered its annual operating profit by over 3% to $3.9bn, due to higher than expected customer gain costs in a saturated market. Digitel (Philippines) reports higher (+48%) 2007 revenues to $403m. FON raises almost $10m in a new funding round....

The Brazilian government supports the merger between Oi and Brazil Telecom, as a strong challenger to Telefonica and America Movil. India : two state owned telcos (BSNL and MTNL) may get 3G spectrum before the private companies if they agree to pay the...

Gregoire Dallemagne , ex KPN and Tele2 Belgium, will become Belgacom ' s executive VP for strategy. Ericsson cuts 290 jobs in two Swedish towns. Carl De Wilde , Tellabs ' Sales & Strategy Executive, will retire and leave the company. FT plans to lay off...

A few set of market information released this week: ABI Research warns that the worldwide GSM subscriber base growth rate would reduce to 14% in 2008/2009 (vs 22% in 2006/2007), but still the dominant technology with a 70% market share in 2013. According...

DoCoMo ' share in the Japanese mobile market sinks below 50% for the first time with 53.4m subscribers. Middle-East and Africa 3G subscribers pass 13m mark, of which 12m are WCDMA. Mobile : 3G Americas and Informa announce that there are 3bn GSM-based...

NXP Semiconductors and STMicroelectronics will combine their wireless chip businesses in a JV that would be a top 3 industry player. STMicroelectronics will have a 80% stake in the JV. Motorola finally agreed with Carl Icahn to name one of his allies...

ALU has signed contracts to upgrade/ expand the optical backbone network of OTE (Greece), and of TelePacific (California) . It will also deliver a very high-speed network to connect France’s leading higher education institutions and research centers....

FT will launch Orange internet TV services with Eutelsat in France and Poland, and with SES Astra in Spain. Vodafone and BT announced a 5-year managed network solutions deal in the UK. Vodafone will be able to use BT' s 21CN Ethernet services for backhauling....

Singtel (Singapore) plans to upgrade its broadband wireless networks in Singapore and six more countries to 40 Mbit/s over the next 2-3 years. Telecom NZ plans to invest $1.1bn in the fiscal year 2009 to upgrade its network (optical, broadband and mobile)...