2007-07-08

Back to basic - give back 3G what 3G was designed for

Hutchison's 3G finally decided to face the reality, to sell 3G as what it should be, i.e. mobile data transmission... and was rewarded by its customers, and shareholder's.

Stories has that back in the crazy era of 1999-2000, every major strategy consulting firm has been engaged in the bidding 'strategy' for the 3G license in Europe. The business was so good that some prestigeous firm worked for 2 rival consortia for the same bid. Of course, there were Chinese Walls among the teams and the teams worked from different cities.

A few months after the bid, people met and were allowed to talk about the non-sensitive details in the aftermath. The valuation from the two teams turned out to be about 10 times apart, based on completely different assumption of which level of the value chain the operator can capture.

Of course, we now know which team did the best service to its client. For the winning consortium, the difficult choice is to redo its business plan and recognize the reality. it took more than 7 years for Hutchison to do so, but it is better late than not getting there.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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