BOTH the winning Dutch Swedish consortium of KPN/Telia and the losing Tele Danmark consortium have experience of radical restructuring.
A major attraction for Telecom is that KPN and Telia are both members of Unisource, a consortium of European telecommunications companies.
Unisource in turn has linked up with AT&T, the largest telecommunications company in the world, to form Uniworld.
KPN is the most productive company in Europe and has a high telephone line/employee ratio.
This allows KPN to offer cheaper calls than any other European company.
Telia and KPN combined have an extremely strong balance 5ht, recording a combined turnover of £10.7 billion in 1994.
Tele Danmark is 51 per cent state owned, and is one of Dens mark's biggest companies. Its market capitalisation is £2 billion and it is ranked 223rd in Europe's to 500 firms.
The company announced bumps profits for last year, around £400 million, but warned that its earnings were unlikely to reach the same level this year.
Tele Danmark blamed competition to its core business for the drop. It said its strategic growth programme could cause a short term fall in earnings, with the cost of investments reducing liquidity.
