China Telecom gains global reach

China Telecom is one of the world’s most dynamic telcos and is touting for European business.

To London’s swish Landmark Hotel, where China Telecom (CT) is to hold a seminar. Foolishly, I imagine there will be a smallish room of old China hands. Instead I learn that, for this company, a seminar can fill a banqueting suite with 150 suits.

Like Lenovo, Huawei and other Chinese IT multinationals, CT has vaulting ambitions. Big in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and especially Hong Kong, it opened offices in the US in 2002, and will be in London and Frankfurt from the end of this month.

The numbers show some of CT’s strengths. Assets, $55bn. Phone and broadband subscribers, 215 and 22 million. Annual revenues, $17bn. Planned overseas revenues by 2016, $1.2bn. Account managers, 10,000. R&D staff, 1,500.

The firm organises video-conferencing between China and New York City, Washington, San Jose and Los Angeles. It’s big in ocean and land fibre, satellite communications, and submarine cable. Its newly built CN2 network covers 199 Chinese cities, with a round trip delay on calls of just 45ms.

All that looks weightier to me than the efforts of AT&T or BT.

The UK imports £13bn of goods from China and exports £3bn in return. No wonder CT murmurs about scaling up its Europe/Asia network from 2.5Gbit/s today to 400Gbit/s in future. It leases private circuits so UK multinationals can talk to their offices in China, and it organises web hosting, shared storage, and fast internet access in the interior. Call latency between Beijing and London: 160ms.

At the seminar, the case studies are impressively global.

CT has put in a virtual private network for a Chinese car manufacturer coming to Britain – probably Nanjing Automobile Group, purchaser of Rover. CT has also done the outsourcing for CSPC, a $4.3bn chemicals complex in south east China and, as a 50-50 partnership between the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Shell, the largest ever Sino-foreign joint venture.

From the podium, friendly young technocrats deliver speeches in good English. This year they hope to be able to give customers a leased line anywhere in China within 20 days, and there is a 24/7 customer service centre.

Soon, CT will offer overseas clients Best Tone, a contact-centre-based search engine and internet portal for business and leisure information about China, as well as reservations and all the rest.

Winding up, a dapper Dr Sun Jian suggests that new customers who are today busy with network management “will no longer have to stare at a screen all day and night – China Telecom will do it”. Now I know CT has 100,000 maintenance engineers on its books, I might just have to believe him.