The Swiss are leery about closer ties with the European Community but the government feels safer moving in lock-step, and so it is observing the Community timetable for telecommunications liberalisation, and the first big commercial competitor for state-owned Telekom-PTT has run its colours up the mast – and in a call likely to interest both British Telecommunications Plc and Cable & Wireless Plc, the latter via its German connection, it says it wants a leading international phone company to join the party and lend its experience. British Telecom obliquely confirmed that it was interested and said that any involvement would be direct, and not with its German connections. The consortium will use what is described as a magnificent infrastructure, the national fibre-optic network built by Schweizerisch BundesBahn, Swiss Federal Railways, one of the three partners. The other two are Union Bank of Switzerland and the Migros federation, a chain of retail co-operatives. The bank will be the project manager, and the venture is intended to become a second provider of voice, data and multimedia services in Switzerland after Telekom-PTT. The Swiss state phone company has effectively ruled out AT&T Corp, Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV, Telia AB and Telefonica de Espana SA as potential partners for its rival, because it is allied with all of them in the Unisource BV and Uniworld ventures. Migros is regarded as important because its market position as a dominant retailer is seen as offering the new venture unique access to consumers for its products and services. The unnamed venture plans to start operations in January and to offer commercial services from January 1 1998. It will initially be capitalised at $836,500 with the railway holding 40%, the bank and Migros 30% each. Flotation of part of the equity is in the eventual plan, and UBS says that it is treating the venture as a merchant banking activity, and intends to divest its holding in the medium term.
