Marshall Schwartzs' talk 12/3/97

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Economic Round Table of San Francisco : One Thread

Mr Schwartz addressed his topic, the globalization of telecommunication services, by developing a thesis concerning the future of that huge and rapidly growing industry. That thesis predicted that the internationalization of those services will eventually involve massive consolidation of the industry into 4 or 5 huge players. Local companies remaining in business will do so as marketing arms of those huge conglomerates. These conglomerates may eventually become unrecognizable because, for example, the Italian telephone company may own a piece of the German phone company who, in turn, owns a piece of Sprint and so on. The biggest unaffiliated player, NT&T, the Japanese phone company so far has not been an active player in the globalization market. Its domestic market so far is not available for participation in globalized long distance services. That will change eventually. Cellular services are the most rapidly growing worldwide form of telephone service. The infrastructure capital costs of putting in such a service are approximately 1/10 those of setting up new, hard wired systems. Maintenance costs are cheaper with cellular systems as well. Discussion at this presentation ranged across a variety of topics including the regulation of international service as compared with local service, investment opportunities with the best international growth prospects, and the way to find a cheaper long distance service. summary provided by Henry Alker

-- Henry Alker (HAlker@aol.com), December 03, 1997

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