Iberians invest R$40 million in launch of Vivo wireless joint venture

Brasilcel, the Portugal Telecom/Telefonica Moviles wireless joint venture, launched the new brand name Vivo on Tuesday, April 8. A marketing campaign goes live on Sunday, April 14, for an estimated investment of 40 million Brazilian Reals in media, store revamps, POS displays and events, among other activities. Vivo will serve 17 million subscribers in 20 states including the Federal District. The media campaign will initially comprise eight states hitherto covered by Telesp Celular, Global Telecom and Telefonica. The area covered by TCO/NBT (11 states and the Federal District) will receive the new name once Anatel has approved the joint venture?s recent acquisition. Besides marketing, Vivo also involves complex operating changes such as unified billing and prepaid roaming.
The billing solution will be either Amdocs or Convergys. For prepaid roaming, management is studying the possibility of extending to operations that originally belonged to Telefonica the solution developed in house for automatic real-time billing of prepaid subscribers to Telesp Celular and Global Telecom. Prepaid roaming is also an obligation for all carriers that migrate to PCS, which is the case with Vivo.
The holding companies involved ? Telesp Celular Participações, Tele Sudeste, Tele Leste, and CRT ? will remain separate legal entities. Aggregate revenue was 9 billion Brazilian Reals in 2002, including TCO/NBT. EBTIDA was 2.7bn BRL. The aggregate result was a net loss of 632m BRL.

Francisco Padinha, president of Brasilcel, once again said the joint venture has no plans for more acquisitions in Brazil even though its footprint doesn?t extend to Minas Gerais and part of the Northeast. For digital roaming and data service in these areas, he?s considering the use of dual-mode handsets (CDMA-1xRTT/GSM-GPRS) recently launched by Samsung.