Sumitomo Corp said it, together with a US-European telecommunications group, will form a joint venture with a Chinese concern to provide local telephone service in Tianjin. Investing some $190m, the joint venture will set up 300,000 local circuits and recover the investments by collecting a share of the revenues for the phone services. Participating in the project are the Global One alliance of Sprint Corp, France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom AG, and local operator Tianjin Communications Investment Co, which will become the operator of the project to satisfy Chinese regulations forbidding foreign companies from directly operating domestic telephone services. The joint venture will be named Tianjin Global Communications Co. Sumitomo will make the largest financial contribution of more than $95m to the project, which it says is to be completed before 2000.
