Telecommunications carrier Sprint officially opened its Asia-Pacific office in Hong Kong yesterday, hoping its slow but steady growth will outpace rivals in the long run.
America's third-largest long-distance phone company, which will focus on offering dedicated Net access, Internet protocol (IP) services, and managed network services to Internet service providers (ISPs) and corporations in the region, faces competition from entrenched, larger companies such as WorldCom.
Instead of building big cables and data centres before finding customers, Sprint said it would create network capacity as needed, avoiding huge capital expenditure at a time when few companies can afford to splash out.
'We think we're being much more judicious in the use of that capital,' said Len Lauer, president of the global markets group. Mr Lauer was visiting Hong Kong from his Kansas office.
Sprint was nearly taken over by WorldCom last year, but the deal did not go through.
Sprint, which has its own fibre-optic IP network, and similar companies have been eyeing the growing Internet traffic from the United States to the Asia-Pacific region and within Asia.
Despite being well known in the US, Sprint is little known in Asia. The Nasdaq-listed company has been working in the region since the mid-1980s. However, for much of the past decade it was operating under an alliance with France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom called Global One. The Global One venture, which started in 1994, had a presence in the region, but Sprint eventually withdrew from the partnership, Sprint executives said.