Gates details Microsoft's LatAm portal

From...

March 22, 2000
Web posted at: 8:57 a.m. EST (1357 GMT)

by Juan Carlos Perez

(IDG) -- Microsoft and Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) provided details Tuesday about a joint venture announced in October 1999 to operate a Web portal for Latin America, and pledged to dip into their deep pockets to support the project.

"We will devote all the resources necessary to make this venture a success," said Carlos Slim, Telmex's chairman of the board, during a press conference at Microsoft's Latin America Enterprise Solutions Conference 2000.

Microsoft's Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates echoed Slim's pledge.

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"We want to make this the leading Spanish-language portal for everybody in the world," Gates said.

The executives, however, did not specify the financial details of their commitment to the project.

This partnership brings together one of the Latin America's most powerful telecommunications companies and one of the world's most powerful IT companies, and makes Latin America's already crowded Web portal market even more competitive.

Telmex dominates the Mexican telecom market, including its ISP sector, and Microsoft has a broad presence in Latin America, where it has subsidiaries in 13 countries, and where its MSN Hotmail Web-based e-mail service has about 5 million users.

The joint venture announced Tuesday, called T1msn, is based on what the company is calling a "federation" concept, where T1msn will be a gateway serving as a first point of entry to a collection of Web sites associated with the joint venture and run by independent content and service providers.

"We will not put together an editorial team," said Gerardo Villareal, T1msn's chief executive officer, during the press conference.

However, every site that is part of the federation will have a similar layout, Villareal added.

T1msn will add country-specific local sections to its portal (see link below). The Mexican section is already up, and, over the next 12 months, T1msn plans to add sections for other countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru. Cental American countries will also be targeted. It also will have a section tailored for U.S. Hispanics.

Microsoft will provide a variety of its branded services, such as Web-based e-mail MSN Hotmail, instant messaging service MSN Messenger, search engine MSN Search and user-authentication service MSN Passport for e-commerce.

Telmex brings to the table a large customer base, especially in Mexico, but in other countries including the U.S., executives said. Telmex also offers a massive telecommunications infrastructure in Mexico and content, executives added.

The business model is similar to Yahoo's, Gates said -- advertising driven. But T1msn will also provide e-commerce and online banking, executives said.

However, T1msn has no immediate plans to enter Brazil's portal market, the executives said, because the company is focused on the Spanish-language market. It wasn't clear whether Microsoft plans to form another joint venture to create a Portuguese-language portal to target Brazil, where almost half of Latin America's Internet users reside.

T1msn faces competition from the likes of Yahoo, America Online, StarMedia Network, Spain's Telefonica and Brazil's UOL. These are some of the companies already battling it out in the region's Internet market, which is expected to explode in terms of e-commerce revenue and number of users in the coming years. Unlike T1msn, these companies peddle their portals and Internet access services to both Spanish and Portuguese speakers.

"Everybody believes that Latin America will move very strongly in the Internet area," Gates said. "Our commitment to Latin America is as strong as ever."

Gates refused to answer questions about the company's antitrust legal problems in the U.S. during the press conference, saying the topic at hand was T1msn.

Lycos launches raft of services for Latin America
February 7, 2000
Lycos opens first Asia-Pacific portal
December 9, 1999
Lycos launches LatAm sites
October 21, 1999
LatAm online to grow the fastest
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T1msn

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