Although pressure from competitors such as International Discount Telephones Inc led France Telecom to lower some of its international rates on January 1, the company’s president has made a worthy effort to make out that it was all part of his business plan, in an interview with Le Figaro Economie. My priority is the competitiveness of France Telecom, its objective being to gain the loyalty of our customers, Marcel Roulet declares. This involves, in particular, continuing to improve the level of our service, understanding better the needs of our customers at the level of quality and of our price-performance. With that in mind, Roulet says he last month signed a business plan, which forecasts an overall decline in its tariffs, in constant francs, of 3% per year for the next four years. We are going to reduce the price of certain professional services, and have decided some equally important reductions in the price of telephone communication with several foreign nations, particularly North America and Japan, he says. North America is, incidentally, the region to which largest discounts were available using International Discount’s services. We have to assure the best performance to every residential, as well as professional subscriber, responding to their needs to build enterprise networks in France and overseas, wherever they are established. Overseas investment is, he notes, not an end in itself, but corresponds to strategic choices and specific technologies. In an accompanying article, Le Figaro reports that France Telecom wants to realise 10% of its revenues from outside France by the year 2000. In the next four years, France Telecom will invest $28,000m. Globally, 90% of that investment is earmarked for improving the network and improving services. France Telecom, says Roulet, intends to keep the transport of information at the heart of its business. Within that domain, he notes, there are several sectors it intends to develop, including mobile phones, with the arrival of its Bi-Bop urban Telepoint pocket phone and of the transmission, such as deploying fibre optics on the network. He acknowledges that the added value that his organisation can bring to such services is increasingly in software, and from that point of view, the control of this software is strategic for us. For this reason, he says, many of France’s software and services companies have a large involvement in France Telecom’s development activities. The transport of image, via satellite and cable technologies, is an important area of development activity for the company, says Roulet, as is shown by the recent launch of a new satellite, Telecom 2.
