This is AT&T’s European alliance, the US phone giant declared as it formally announced plans to create a new joint venture telecommunications services company with Unisource BV in Hoofddorp in the Netherlands yesterday. The new company, which does not even have a name yet, will be 40% owned by AT&T Corp and 60% by Unisource, which in turn is currently equally owned by Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV and the Swiss and Swedish state-owned telephone utilities; Telefonica de Espana SA is committed to join as an equal partner, and other phone companies may join Unisource later. Everything is still studiously vague at this stage, but it will start life with $200m of assets from the partners’ existing activities in the relevant fields, 2,000 employees, and $500m in annual turnover, rising to $1,000m once Telefonica gets itself into gear and is ready to partipate. We’re not going to give away any detailed spending plans, but this is going to be a large company. We have a $1,000m investment plan to help it develop its markets and products and to develop its own expertise, said Pier Carlo Falotti, president of AT&T Europe. It’s going to be the AT&T company in Europe, he said – although AT&T Istel Ltd here in the UK will not be a part of it. It will primarily offer data and business voice services to large multinational companies in Europe, with a single standard and one-stop ordering billing and provisioning. Unisource will contribute its business networks, satellite and voice services divisions and AT&T its Business Communications Services Europe and AT&T Easylink units. It will have employees in 17 countries and will pool the 300 multinational clients of the partners, giving them improved access to North America and the Asia-Pacific region. Unisource did a deal with SITA, the major airlines’ Society for International Transport by Air, covering a carve-up of services earlier this year (CI No 2,387), but that will have to be renegotiated in light of the new initiative, since SITA was to have looked after Unisource customers whose primary focus was intercontinental telecommunications – the area where AT&T wants to drum up extra business from the alliance – while Unisource would do the same for SITA users whose primary focus was Europe. Subject to regulatory approval by the European Community, the venture is expected to be fully operational by the middle of 1995.
