The heavy demands of investment to keep up with consumer demand in the mobile communications market gobbled up what profits Societe Francaise de Radiotelephone SA, France’s second-largest cellular communications operator, might have seen in 1994. The company reported that its investments of approximately $375m to deploy its Groupe Speciale Mobile network brought it to a loss of approximately $135m on revenues of approximately $312m. This compares with a slight profit in 1993. The company expects to invest the equivalent of about $729m in the same network. Although it said it will not be profitable this year, it expects to see continued growth in its revenues of between 40% to 50%. It also asserted that it is ahead of its subscriber projections by some 20,000. At the end of June, the majority-owned subsidiary of Generale des Eaux SA announced that it had accumulated more than 300,000 subscribers on both its analogue and Groupe Speciale Mobile networks. The company is forecasting 430,000 subscribers, of which 280,000 will be on the Groupe Speciale Mobile network, by the end of 1995. Cofira SA, the holding company of Generale des Eaux that controls the mobile operator and messaging company TDR, became profitable in 1994, about $19.38m so, due to the arrival of Vodafone Group Plc as a shareholder. In other developments at the company, French systems integration company Steria SA announced the installation of the first phase of network management applications for the operator’s analogue network. Similar applications for the Groupe Speciale Mobile network are slated for the end of the year. The system comprises three main functions: network configuration management; regional and national network supervision; and management of maintenance and intervention procedures. It gives operators in eight regional and national network centres sitting at Sun Microsystems Inc Unix workstations a real-time view of the state of the network.
