NEW YORK-Telekomunikacja Polska SA, Poland’s national telecommunications carrier, was expected to raise about $1 billion last week in a private placement of debt to about 300 institutional investors.
Late last month, the supervisory board of TPSA decided to increase the planned offering of five-year and 10-year euro notes to $1 billion from the $800 million originally planned. J.P. Morgan Securities and Salomon Smith Barney are managers of the private placement.
The debt sale follows by several weeks the carrier’s initial public offering, in which the Polish government sold a 15-percent stake for about $1.5 billion.
Shares of the wireline and wireless telecommunications company, which has a total market capitalization of about $7 billion, began trading Nov. 20 on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. TPSA also has applied for listing on the New York Stock Exchange and hopes to become the first Polish company listed on the Big Board.
Emil Wasacz, Poland’s treasury minister, said negotiations are under way to find a strategic investor to acquire 25 percent to 35 percent of TPSA.
Despite these recent and planned privatization initiatives, “the (Polish) government is likely to retain a substantial stake in the company until the telecom market is fully liberalized in 2003,” said Juan Jose Garcia Seijo and Louis Landeman, analysts for Standard & Poor’s Corp.
S&P has assigned an investment-grade, long-term local currency corporate credit rating of BBB and a long-term foreign currency corporate credit rating of BBB- to TPSA.
TPSA controls about 98 percent of the wireline telecommunications market in Poland. It also owns a 66-percent stake of Centertel, a cellular carrier in which France Telecom Mobiles International holds the remaining 34-percent interest.
In a separate development in late November, shareholders of Centertel voted to raise an additional $159 million between 1999 and 2001 to finance developments that include expansion of the carrier’s Global System for Mobile communications 1800 cellular network.
Marketed under the “Idea” brand, the GSM network covers Poland’s 10 major urban areas. The goal is to extend the Idea network so it covers all major roads and is available to about 15 million people in 25 percent of the country’s land area.
Centertel, established in 1992, also operates a Nordic Mobile Telephone analog cellular network that covers nearly all of Poland.
