A group of 20 multinational companies with European bases, including ICL Plc and Unilever Plc are forming a company to buy all their telephony traffic and bargain with telecommunications carriers for cheaper and better telephony service. The private UK company, EVUA Ventures Ltd, which will be officially formed next month and starts operations on 1 January 1998, plans to buy $50m worth of voice traffic in its first year, and plans to expand to buying $250m by the year 2000, which would be around 6 million minutes – over eleven years – worth of voice traffic a year. On January 1, as the European telecoms market starts to deregulate, these 20 companies will have EVUA bargain with incumbent telecoms providers or start-up carriers for cheaper traffic, hoping to gain a stronger bargaining position through the increased volume of traffic on order. EVUA’s founders have already mediated in negotiations with the international telecoms alliances Concert, AT&T Unisource and Global One. EVUA will operate by buying call time and then partitioning it out to its shareholders, which get the advantage of having the contracts negotiated by EVUA, and the bandwidth assigned to them, without having to negotiate directly, or decipher complex international pricing structures. EVUA will be headed by Chief Executive Philip Barton, who is running the company for its first year on secondment from pharmaceutical giant Zeneca Plc, where he is telecommunications strategy manager. Barton will have an undisclosed shareholding in EVUA. Further executive and non executive directors are to be appointed in November. The company is to be non profit making, with all profits redistributed to its shareholders either in cash or as call time. EVUA will not sell call time to non shareholders of the company, and will initially only be buying Virtual Private Network voice capacity. It plans to expand into data and Internet bandwidth, by buying Frame Relay capacity. The eventual ideal is to buy Asynchronous Transfer Mode capacity, so that companies can route voice, video and data traffic through a network, and only have to use one communications connection. EVUA ventures is an offshoot of the European Virtual Network Users Association, a pressure group with 60 multinational companies as members formed in 1993 by Barton to persuade telecoms providers to offer customers virtual private networks and to help negotiate contracts. Other than ICL and Unilever, the identities of the corporate shareholders have not been disclosed.
