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Peggy Sito

Pacific Concord Holding says it will invest more than $100 million to expand its Chinese-character paging business in China over the next few years.

Executive director Kwan Kai-cheong said the company planned to install more than 20 paging network stations in major cities to enlarge the coverage of its services there.

Expenses of each station would be more than $5 million, making an estimated investment cost of $100 million for the planned expansion, he said.

Pacific Concord has 37 network stations on the mainland.

Through its Chinese-character pagers, known as mobile information terminals, the company had about 600,000 subscribers, or a 20 per cent share of the mainland's Chinese-character paging market.

Compared with the entire paging market of the mainland, the share was not very significant.

 Mr Kwan said there were more than 18 million pager subscribers in China. Of that figure, only three million subscribers used Chinese-character pagers.

 The remainder used numerical pagers.

Mr Kwan expected high growth in the Chinese-character paging market over the next few years.

'In the year 2000, it is expected that there will be 70 million subscribers in China's paging market,' he said.

'Forty per cent or 28 million are estimated to be Chinese-character pager subscribers.'   He hoped the company would achieve a 50 per cent share of the Chinese-character pager market.

Early this year the company placed US$25 million of bonds which will be convertible into ordinary shares of its 60 per cent-owned telecommunications investment arm Concord Telecommunications Holding if it is spun off for a separate listing on a stock exchange.

Mr Kwan said it still intended to hive off its telecommunications business but the plan was not finalised.



Pacific Concord plans to spend $100m on China paging networks