Woosh loss

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sbiddle

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#26678 18-Jan-2006 10:06

alasta: The article that Jama refers to notes that Woosh's owners are "experienced infrastructure investors", and I think it's fair to believe that they would have made their initial investment with the expectation that it would be a hard road. The risk is that, because there are such a small number of investors, one of them walking away could prompt the others to do likewise.

I think the big difference was that Woosh had no business sence when it launched, no business plan and a technology that in real life performed nowhere as well as the was promised. The technology has improved since then but is still a long way from what was promised.

Combine that with their winning bids for Probe that were handed back after they couldn't deliver and their inability to capture customers and it's hardly a company with a great track record.

alasta

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#26680 18-Jan-2006 10:14

RACK:The gear alone is worth more than $20M, why would Woosh sell out to Telecom at a bargain basement price?

There was another article on stuff.co.nz a couple of months ago which suggested that Callplus or Ihug may be interested in purchasing Woosh purely for their customer base, but were not interested in making use of Woosh's infrastructure.

If the infrastructure were to be sold, I would have some doubts as to whether it would fetch anywhere near its book value. After all, TelstraClear have ruled out setting up their own mobile offering here.

nzdn

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#26686 18-Jan-2006 12:17

TelstraClear must surely loom large as potential buyers, given their very public musings about introducing a mobile service. Woosh has enough cell sites to cross the 10% threshold for piggybacking off Vodafone (probably after a lengthy word-by-word legal battle over the relevant regulations), and TC already has the spectrum.

I suspect TC are just biding their time so they can buy at rock bottom when Woosh's backers cut their losses. Econet is the only other obvious bidder but they don't appear to have deep enough pockets.

The other day a radio newsreader said "T-Mobile is coming to New Zealand". It turned out to be only the cycling team, but I could just picture all those soiled executive chairs being sent out for drycleaning :)

Both Vodafone and Telecom may be interested, if only to limit the number of cell networks, but I doubt they're likely to get past ComCom. Perhaps they could promise they'll make a go of Woosh to get approval, then run it poorly for a couple of years and close it down claiming it's unprofitable and unpopular.

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#26697 18-Jan-2006 14:40

nzdn:
The other day a radio newsreader said "T-Mobile is coming to New Zealand". It turned out to be only the cycling team, but I could just picture all those soiled executive chairs being sent out for drycleaning :)

... Competition... thats scary stuff!

Offtopic: Your post count has -1 posts?!?

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the_nurd

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#27014 24-Jan-2006 17:00

it is such a pity that woosh is still so buggy, it would be nice to see them take a chunk out of telecom, but if you do not need it for on the move then it still seems that cable is the way to go.
and what is up with telstraclear saying we cant get broadband in our house without having our phone put on them too instead of telecom?

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