Word: pccw
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...their homelands have a long way to go. "China is like a student learning modern business management. We have only just graduated from junior high school," said Edward S. Tian, vice chairman and chief executive of China Netcom Group, which recently acquired 20% of the Hong Kong telecommunications firm PCCW. China watchers are expecting a wave of such transactions, as the nation tries to create its own brands. Already, Chinese firms have bought IBM's personal computer business and the television company that owns the RCA brand. But some attempts to grow internationally have run into huge obstacles, including cnooc...
...Expanding into new businesses is a matter of survival for traditional phone companies. "Voice revenue is coming to an end," says Andrew Chatham, Gartner Group's Asia telco analyst. "So phone companies need to look at other areas while they still have money." Paul Berriman, PCCW's head of strategic market development, says such concerns were precisely what prompted it to relaunch NOW as a pay-TV service: "There was the danger that if we didn't act, we could have been made redundant...
...Broadband's quick start is partly attributable to its unusual business model. Anyone signed up for PCCW broadband Internet access is eligible for a free set-top box to also hook up the same line to his TV. Instead of selling basic cable-style packages, which often force consumers to pay for channels they don't want, PCCW opted to offer a content menu that is almost entirely ? la carte. Fees for individual channels?among them BBC, HBO, the Disney Channel and MTV?start at about $2 a month. Subscribers can readily drop channels and sign...
...other carriers duplicate NOW Broadband's pay-TV success? Not necessarily, because PCCW (which is in talks with the parent of China's second largest fixed-line operator) has advantages other carriers lack. For one thing, Hong Kong is one of the world's most densely populated cities, so it's relatively inexpensive to reach everyone with high-speed connections. Besides, PCCW?which won't say if its TV service is profitable?did not have to spend heavily to upgrade its network for two-way TV. That's because NOW Broadband runs over an Internet and interactive TV infrastructure mostly...
...Whether NOW Broadband is a role model or an aberration, it's hard to argue with the numbers. PCCW has been signing up about 70% of all new pay-TV subscribers in Hong Kong; it will be the city's top provider of pay TV by 2009, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report. "Other phone companies are watching this closely," says Media Partners' executive director Vivek Couto. If Li can revive his new-media business model, maybe others can as well...