CAT Telecom is planning to rebrand its own CDMA mobile phone service and that of Hutch once it concludes the deal to take over Hutchison Group's service.

CAT president Jirayuth Roongsrithong said the customers of the two services were separated clearly by their service providers. CAT provides service across the country, while Hutch is available in Bangkok and 25 provinces in the Central region.

But he said that after the acquisition deal expected this year, both service brands would be merged and renamed.

Hutch now has about one million customers, while CAT CDMA has only 400,000 customers.

He said that CAT's financial adviser had already assessed the value of the Hutch business to be bought and was now considering the appropriate price to negotiate with Hong Kong-based Hutchison.

He said the price would include the interconnection (IC) fees that Hutch has to pay other mobile phone operators. Hutch has a small customer base and therefore has high outgoing traffic that results in a heavy IC burden.

However, Hutch has not yet paid IC fees because it has not entered formal IC agreements with any of the other operators.

He said this problem had caused difficulties for Hutch customers to make calls with friends in other networks, particularly True Move.

But CAT is now negotiating with True and is confident that the problem would be resolved once the takeover deal of Hutch is settled and IC agreements are signed with other operators.

He said that if the deal was concluded, CAT would use a new brand that represents only CAT's nationwide service, and this would also enable CAT to be a strong provider of 3G services because of its large coverage area.

Although TOT has started providing 3G services, they are limited only to Bangkok and neighbouring provinces.

Hutchison CAT Wireless MultiMedia Ltd is a joint venture between CAT Telecom and Hutchison Wireless MultiMedia Holdings Limited.

The company was awarded the contract in 2000 to provide marketing services for the digital CDMA network of CAT Telecom under the Hutch brand.

Mr Jirayuth also said that the CAT board had recently approved the establishment of representative offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Laos to take care of its international gateway customers.

The three places where representative offices are located are key connection to other regions in the world.

Source:bangkokpost