HONG KONG—The Hong Kong telecom regulator announced the initial results of the first phase of its third-generation (3G) license auction.
The successful bidders are Hong Kong CSL, a company jointly owned by Telstra and Pacific Century CyberWorks; Hutchison 3G HK, a company jointly owned by Hutchison Whampoa and NTT DoCoMo; SmarTone 3G; and Sunday 3G (Hong Kong). All four companies have current second-generation (2G) networks operating in Hong Kong’s competitive mobile market.
The four applicants have each been provisionally awarded a license at the reserve price of 5-percent royalty subject to a minimum payment of US$6.4 million for each of the first five years and increasing minimum payments after year six.
“We welcome the result of this exercise, because both the number of licenses and the price have been determined by the market,” said Carrier Yau, Hong Kong secretary for information technology and broadcasting.
Hong Kong is holding a hybrid method licensing process, involving a prequalification process followed by spectrum auctioning based on a royalty percentage.
Following the completion of the first phase, the second phase of the spectrum auction will be held if there are material connections among the provisional successful bidders and the bidders fail to submit an irrevocable undertaking for disconnection. The third phase of the auction will be held to decide the specific spectrum allocations for successful bidders. The auction is set to be completed by October, with licenses issued by the end of the year.
A day after the 3G licenses were awarded, Ericsson said it had agreed to supply SmarTone with an end-to-end wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) solution, including handsets, core network, radio access network, network management solutions and other related services.
“Our migration to the new era of 3G is a natural extension of our joint efforts with Ericsson in the field of communications,” said Douglas Li, chief executive officer of SmarTone Telecommunications Holdings.
