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Hutch: No change in 3G plans
HONG KONG, China -- Hutchison Whampoa insists it still plans to have paying customers for its third-generation cell-phone service in the U.K. by the end of the year. "Our plans remain unchanged," spokeswoman Nora Yong told Reuters news agency on Monday. "We hope to have paying customers by the end of this year." The comments came in response to a Financial Times article stating the company would likely miss that deadline. The company has switched to a 24-hour work day to try to hit that launch date. Hutchison's first third generation, or 3G, phones arrived in Britain last month. The company has also expanded its deal to take 3G phones from Japanese cell-phone maker NEC Corp. For its part, NEC agreed at the start of October to pay $73 million for a 5 percent stake in Hutchison Telephone Co., the company's mobile phone subsidiary, and 5 percent of Hutchison 3G HK Holdings. (Full story) Hundreds of small hitches in soft launchNEC has since been carrying out a "soft launch" of the service, issuing phones to "friends" of the company in Britain and Italy. It has said it hopes to enroll 1 million 3G customers in each of those countries by the end of 2003. But Hutchison has been experiencing hundreds of small technical hitches in introducing its service. It is still trying to solve the problem of calls getting dropped when phone users move from a 3G area to an area of conventional 2G coverage. The company will not launch its service until that issue is resolved, the FT states. Battery life has also been troublingly low for life video-conferencing calls, one of the key selling ponts of the service. The current batteries only allow for around an hour of video conferencing, which drains a lot of power. The company reportedly made its first international video call last week, between mobile phones in the United Kingdom and Australia. Avoiding strict deadlinesHutch has carefully avoided setting itself too many strict deadlines in introducing its 3G service, which NTT DoCoMo first rolled out in Japan in 2001. DoCoMo's rollout was delayed four months and also had numerous technical issues, including an e-mail glitch that hit immediately after the start of service. (Full story) Hutch is trying to make sure its service is in full working order before a formal debut. "We are not committing ourselves to any strict deadline, because we do not want to compromise customer experience," Yong said. She conceded the service has had "many small issues," though she denied there were major problems. Stock in Hutchison Whampoa, controlled by Li Ka-shing, Asia's richest man, closed up 4.77 percent on Monday, at HK$50.50. The Hang Seng index powered to a 3.33 percent gain at 9,720.83 ahead of an expected U.S. interest rate cut. Reuters contributed to this report.
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