Crumbs
Rich T finds some tasty titbits you might have missed in the week's news
Monday 20 August 2007, 5:14 PM
Iraqi mobile licences go for a song
Remember the good ol' days of 2000 when there was more life in the telecoms industry than the engine of Michael Schumacher's F1 car? The five mobile operators who splashed out £4bn+ each for a mobile licence certainly do. And so does the UK government - £22bn the richer from that little money-making exercise.
All this makes Friday's Iraqi mobile licence auction look very cheap indeed. For a starter, each mobile operator will only have two competitors, and there's next-to-no landline network left after sanctions were imposed in 2003.
Iraq's Asiacell and Korek plus Kuwait's MTC managed to buy their licences for just $1.25bn each, or not much over £600m.
They've now got 8million subscribers - or nearly one-third of the Iraqi population - to fight over. The deal is looking more and more like a bargain, even if the public purse gains to the tune of an 18 percent revenue share.
Let's hope a little more stability comes to the country by the time they roll out their networks.
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