Kirch, DT near pact to market Premiere
Cabler targeting phone service
A Kirch Group spokesman confirmed that the two companies are in talks, but refrained from giving further details.
The report suggested that DT would sell subscriptions to Premiere World via its own outlets. Currently, subscriptions for Premiere and DF-1, the two platforms that are being merged into Premiere World, are managed by the two companies.
The newspaper said that DT would receive 25% of the subscription sales.
According to an internal DT document which the paper cites, the telco is expecting cable operators to make DM850 million ($450 million) from subscriptions sales for pay TV by 2005, when it forecasts that there will be 4.3 million pay TV subscribers in Germany.
4.6 mil phoning via cable by 2005
Other Deutsche Telekom projections were unveiled in the paper, citing a confidential memo DT sent to the Rothschild Bank regarding its plans to sell its cable networks. In the memo, DT estimates that by 2005, more than 4.6 million customers could be won for telephone service via the cable nets and an additional 1.5 million customers for the Internet.
Furthermore, DT projects that if the cable nets were upgraded (at a projected cost of $4.8 billion), they could be expanded to offer online services and generate annual revenues of $4.76 billion and $1.48 billion in profits by 2005.
DT is in the process of spinning off 75% of its cable networks, which are expected to record revenues of $1.3 billion but losses of $86 million next year.
