Jake's View | The head of HKT is saying something very different from his time as a civil servant... and the Communications Authority shouldn’t listen
‘Yes, auction that spectrum and ignore the squealing from HKT’
“Prices for consumers are very, very low in Hong Kong, yet we pay the highest spectral prices in the world. This is not an industry problem. The whole issue here is [the Office of the Communications Authority] and its consultation paper is focused on ... maximising money.”
HKT boss Alex Arena , Business, November 29
For a long period back in the mid-1980’s Hongkong Telephone, as it was then called, had a stock market value much higher than that of The Bank. Strange but true.
The reason was that while briefly under control of the Noble House, a Scottish trading firm that got its start in drug trafficking, HKT managed to secure an absolute monopoly on overseas telecoms traffic until 2006. How it happened I could never fathom, just one those colonial mysteries, I suppose. You know.
But as 1997 and the handover of sovereignty to China approached, clearly this would not do. HKT was still in British hands at that time, held by Cable and Wireless.
One of the people the government then chose to bring about the necessary changes was a certain Alex Arena, who did a superb job of helping turn an inexplicable monopoly into one of the world’s most competitive telecoms environments.