Hutchison 3G To Hit 3G In 2002

Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., Asia's biggest investor in European mobile-phone companies, may not reach its goal of having paying customers for faster wireless services in the U.K. by year-end, a spokesman said.

Picture shows the type of NEC 3G phones involved.

``We can't promise,'' said spokesman Matt Peacock in an interview. ``If things go right we will have paying customers, but, and this is a big but, we have hundreds of little tweaks that need to be put in place before the product is right.''

Hutchison, a company controlled by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, is spending $16.7 billion on businesses in Europe and Hong Kong that use the universal mobile telecommunications system, or UMTS. Officials for ``3,'' Hutchison's brand name in the U.K., Italy and seven other markets, have said they will have paying customers by year-end, though they won't say how many.

The biggest shareholder in Hutchison 3G U.K. Holdings Ltd., the British operation, is Hutchison Whampoa with a 65 percent stake. NTT DoCoMo Inc. owns 20 percent. UMTS trials began this month in the U.K. and Italy, using 1,000 NEC Corp. phones.

Hutchison still expects to have 100,000 handsets by the end of the year, Peacock said. The company has said it could have as many as 1 million U.K. customers and another million in Italy by the end of 2003. Hutchison's phones are being made by NEC and Motorola Inc.

Licenses for faster wireless services sold in 2000 cost European phone companies about $100 billion, one-third of that in Britain alone. Companies such as Vodafone Group Plc and Orange SA, whose share prices have fallen as UMTS services have been delayed, are now starting to offer features such as sending photos by mobile phones as they seek to recoup their investments.

Hutchison earlier this month doubled an order for video mobile phones from NEC, Japan's biggest handset maker, to 2 million units.