Archive for September, 2010
Australia – Telstra has not confirmed stories it will cut another 6,000 jobs, having cut 12,000 since 2005
September 30th, 2010 | 
Author: [smh] Telstra says it has not confirmed how many jobs will be cut under its plan to simplify its business, as unions demand more information from the telco giant.
Media reports today suggest Telstra will cut 6000 staff over the next three years as part of its $1 billion plan to reverse its falling financial performance.
The media reports and Telstra’s response came on a day when the stock slumped over 2 per cent to a record low.
Telstra says its new strategy is aimed at growing market share and will involve a simplification of its business, cost cutting and an improvement in customer service.
Senior executives, including chief executive David Thodey, have said the plans would involve job cuts, but the telco said today it was yet to be determine how many.
‘‘Telstra has not confirmed the number of affected employees and when we do, we will first speak directly to them,’’ a spokesperson said.
Improving customer satisfaction would be done through simplifying customer processes, reducing bureaucracy, particularly in management, and introducing optional self-service systems online, Telstra said.
Telstra shares declined 6 cents, or 2.2 per cent, to close at $2.62, the lowest since the first shares were sold by the government for $3.30 to retail investors in 1997.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) is seeking more information from Telstra about the extent of planned job cuts.
‘‘You cannot cut thousands of jobs without having a major impact on customer service,’’ CPSU Assistant National Secretary Louise Persse said. ‘‘Telstra’s frontline service delivery areas are already stretched.‘‘We can’t see how further cuts will improve things.’’
Senator Doug Cameron, a former trade union official and Labor Party member, was not impressed with the report that Telstra would be cutting jobs.
‘‘I don’t think companies, given the state of the economy, should be looking at downsizing or cutting jobs,’’ he told reporters in Canberra.
Nationals frontbencher Barnaby Joyce said he was concerned the job cuts would come from the bush, while also questioning how the national broadband network would be built if technicians were laid off.
Senator Joyce said 25,000 technicians were needed to build the NBN.
‘‘At best I’d say there are 8000 to 6000 … in Australia, and at this point in time Telstra are actually putting them off,’’ he said.
Telstra told investors on Wednesday it would incur $220 million in redundancy costs in the 2010/11 financial year.
‘‘It is always difficult to make decisions that inevitably affect jobs,’’ the Telstra spokesperson said. ‘‘However, Telstra offers retraining and generous redundancy arrangements to affected employees.’’
Telstra has cut over 12,000 jobs since 2005 as part of a transformation process implemented by former chief executive Sol Trujillo.
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Persian Gulf – Etisalat has made an offer for a major stake in Zain in order to expand its footprint in MENA
[khaleej times] Emirates Telecommunication Corporation, or etisalat, has made an initial offer to buy a major stake in Kuwait’s mobile operator Zain, a spokesman of the UAE telecom operator ?confirmed.
Commenting on media reports about an offer to acquire a 46 per cent stake in Zain at a price of $5.97 a share, the official spokesman of the Abu Dhabi-based etisalat did not confirm the price or the percentage of the conditional offer.
However, media speculation put the value of acquisition at $10.5 billion.
“On Wednesday, etisalat’s share price rose to Dh10.85, gaining 40 fils in the last five trading sessions in anticipation of an imminent acquisition this time,” Bassam Ramahi, general manager at Shuaa Securities in Abu Dhabi told Khaleej Times.
Zain, which did not confirm the offer, saw its share prices gaining 7.9 per cent to close at $4.77, lifting the Kuwait Stock Exchange index to close up by 0.85 per cent to 6,928 points.
“It’s a good news for the equity market,” he said, after a confirmation from etisalat.
Ramahi said both telecom firms stand to benefit from any such deal, as it would complement their business.
“For etisalat, it would be expansion in customer base in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) market where it is trying to step in,” Ramahi said, adding “a significant per cent of stake means it would boost etisalat’s revenues and profit.”
The offer depends on “certain requirements and conditions,” Ahmed bin Ali, the spokesman for etisalat said.
The bid is for all Zain assets controlled by shareholders who own about 46 per cent of the company, including operations in Saudi Arabia, a newswire reported quoting a source.
In March this year, the Kuwait firm sold its operations in 15 African nations to India’s Bharti Airtel for $10.7 billion, netting a profit of more than three billion dollars from the deal.
Besides Kuwait, Zain operates in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Sudan, Jordan and Iraq, Lebanon and Morocco.
Before striking the deal with Bharti, Zain held unsuccessful negotiations with an Indo-Malaysian consortium to sell 46 per cent of the company for about $14 billion.
A purchase would extend etisalat’s reach in the Middle East, where Zain still operates in countries from Kuwait and Iraq to Bahrain after selling most of its African assets this year to Indian billionaire Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Airtel Ltd for $9 billion.
Etisalat offers telecommunications services in 18 countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, counting more than 100 million customers.
Zain had 34.2 million customers at the end of the first half.
Kuwait Investment Authority, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, is Zain’s largest shareholder with 24.6 percent, while the Kharafi Group is the second-largest shareholder, owning about 13 per cent shareholding.
Last month, Zain reported a first-half net income of $3.1 billion, aided by a $2.65 billion gain from the African asset sale. Consolidated revenue from Zain’s Middle East operations rose 10 per cent from a year earlier to $2.33 billion, it said.
India – TRAI has been directed to look afresh at interconnection rates
[economic times] Telecom tribunal today directed sectoral regulator to work out “afresh” network interconnection and call termination charges in consultations with all service providers.
A telecom company pays Interconnect Usage Charges (IUC) and Mobile Termination Charges (MTC) to other operators for connecting and completing its calls on their networks.
The Telecom Disputes Settlement and (TDSAT) remanded the disputed regulation back to TRAI, in which private operators and government-controlled have opposed IUC and MTC fixed by the regulator.
The tribunal also directed Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to complete the whole exercise in a time bound manner, so that the new regulation could be made effective from January 1, 2011.
“We direct TRAI to consider the matter afresh… remand the case to the TRAI with the direction that it will complete the consultation in time bound manner so that new IUC charges could be made effective by January 1, 2010,” said TDSAT Chairman Justice S B Sinha in the order.
In its regulation on March 9, 2009, TRAI had reduced termination charges for all types of domestic calls such as landline to landline, landline to mobile, mobile to landline and mobile to mobile to 20 paise per minute from 30 paise per minute.
Termination charges are paid by an operator to another on whose network the call ends.
The tribunal also directed TRAI to provide adequate time to private telcom operators to respond during the consultation process.
TDSAT’s order came over a bunch of petitions filed by telecom operators including Bharti Airtel , Vodafone, Idea, Reliance Communication and BSNL challenging the IUC fixed by TRAI.
BSNL had submitted that it was losing Rs 2,000 crore annually due to TRAI regulation on ICU.
The operators submitted that TRAI had formulated the IUC charges without consultation process.
Egypt – Telecom Egypt remains keen to buy out Vodafone from its its 45% stake in Vodafone Egypt, but this seem unlikely
[reuters] Landline monopoly Telecom Egypt’s attempts to boost its stake in Vodafone Egypt have been postponed but the firm is studying other ways to get more involved in the mobile market, a minister said on Wednesday
Telecom Egypt, which is owned mostly by the government, is eager to get a bigger piece of the country’s lucrative but competitive mobile industry, which has lured away its fixed-line customers and eaten into its revenues.
The landline operator had been in talks to increase its 45 percent stake in the Vodafone unit, but the negotiations ended in June without a deal.
“This has been postponed for now, and I don’t think that this would be approved soon,” Communications Minister Tarek Kamel said on the sidelines of a conference when asked if Telecom Egypt still planned to increase its stake in the unit.
“The CEO of Vodafone is visiting Egypt in October, but not necessarily to talk about this subject,” he added.
Kamel also said Telecom Egypt was studying the possibility of getting a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) licence, but could not give a timeline for when a licence might be granted.
“It depends on … studies at Telecom Egypt and the telecom regulatory authority but, more importantly, also a commercial agreement between whoever wants to run an MVNO and the existing three mobile operators,” he said.
MVNO operators provide cell phone services without their own network, and so must have lease agreements with other operators.
Mobile – What was formerly 3G Americas has been rebranded as 4G Americas, originally a GSM association it is now wider
[rethink] Industry bodies always face something of a dilemma when their name no longer reflects the most progressive part of their members’ activity. The 3GSM (formerly GSM) show managed the transition by dropping numbers altogether and becoming Mobile World Congress. 3G Americas has taken a more straightforward approach and decided the time is right to morph into 4G Americas.
The organization has also gained a new logo and website to reflect the change, which is designed to reflect where the industry is headed in its region. This is particularly true in the northern part of the Americas, of course, where the US is set to have one WiMAX and at least four LTE systems within two years, but the body will also have important issues to address in Latin America, particularly with regards to spectrum plans there.
Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas, says the change also mirrors the shift towards mobile broadband and how that will impact the association’s objectives. The board of governors was unanimous in approving the change, he said, adding: “4G Americas believes all paths will lead to LTE.” The board currently contains 18 vendors and operators including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens, Huawei and Motorola. It may be able to add further members as the CDMA wing of the market converges on LTE, which could draw in Verizon Wireless.
3G Americas was founded eight years ago to support the GSM/UMTS agenda at a time when that technology had only about 10% share in the Americas. It now has about 75% and the CDMA community is mainly moving to LTE too, though Sprint has supported WiMAX.
The body says its main missions are to “support the 3GPP technology path as it evolves to 4G technology; address standards recommendations, technical requirements and advocacy for 2G and 3G technologies; and serve as the best resource for information on the 3GPP family of technologies throughout the Americas.”
