Partnered with Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez SA and BellSouth Corp on a bid for France’s third mobile telephone operator’s licence, German metallurigical giant Thyssen AG nonetheless expects the French market to be less profitable than its German counterpart, vice-president Dieter Vogel told La Tribune-Defosses. The French mobile telephony market is not, a priori, in an excellent situation. The mobile networks already present in France are having difficulty establishing themselves. But I think, in time, the potential market is comparable with that in Germany, he said. The faults of the market, he said, lie in the concentration of the population in Paris. Although a company is obliged to invest to provide coverage right across metropolitan France, the customer base is concentrated in Paris, making the activity less profitable. Furthermore, he said, interconnection fees are higher than in Germany and some of the frequencies are still being used by the French Army. Thyssen, which runs E-Plus, the third German mobile network, will handle project management, logistics, purchasing and infrastructure installation for the consortium in France.
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