Firms gather to form new telecom group

A government steering committee that will review and monitor plans for a new national telecom company will hold its first working session this week, marking the government's initial step to create a rival for dominant operator Telekomunikacja Polska (TPSA), Deputy Infrastructure Minister Krzysztof Heller told the WBJ last week. The steering committee will consist of members of the treasury, infrastructure, economy and science ministries, and the National Bank of Poland (NBP), which owns a majority stake in the financial data transmission provider Telbank. The new national telecom, Krajowa Grupa Telekomunikacyjna (KGT), will pull together the fixed-line and IT assets of state-owned Polish Power Grid (PSE), including long-distance operator Niezależny Operator Miźdzystrefowy (NOM), data transmission operator Tel-Energo and IT unit PSE-Info. A holding company for the assets, called Tel-Energo Holding, could be established later this month or in August, Heller said. In June, Tel-Energo, which has the second-largest fiber-optic network in Poland, submitted a plan for KGT to the government's Council of Ministers, which amended and approved it. Tel-Energo and NOM are in the process of completing their merger.

The next step The next step is for PSE to transfer its assets to Tel-Energo Holding, a process that could take up to two months, Heller said. PSE's vice president Jan Kowalczyk told a newswire service last week that the firm would offer 20% of the shares of Tel-Energo Holding to financial investors in the autumn, raising $100 million-$300 million for further investment and the acquisition of another telecom firm. There has been speculation that Tel-Energo is interested in buying Telbank, which the NBP must sell by the end of the year. Marcin Gruszka, Tel-Energo's spokesman, said that Kowalczyk's announcement came as a surprise since the parties involved agreed not to talk to the media about their plans for KGT and since all details had not yet been accepted by the government. PSE is talking to several potential financial and telecom investors for the KGT project. Both BRE Bank and Danish telecom TDC have expressed an interest in KGT. "This project is viable even if we are only talking about increasing the operational efficiency of the company; however, in order to really have solid footing, it needs an additional capital injection," Heller said. PSE and Tel-Energo, will now have to submit to the government steering committee a more detailed business plan outlining the merger scenarios of prospective companies that may join KGT, Heller said. The KGT plan also takes into account that some of Poland's private fixed-line operators could join the group, although most are immersed in their own financial problems. "In order to be a public telephone services provider, you need to have a certain critical mass," Heller said. "And as much as we can influence the state-owned companies, we cannot influence the private companies." But if private fixed-line operators don't join KGT, the new company would likely focus only on specialized services, including data transmission, Internet service and long-distance telephony, he said.