3G auction to go ahead despite possible lawsuits
By SIRIVISH TOOMGUM,
USANEE MONGKOLPORN
THE NATION

In photo: ZTE (Thailand) managing director Zhang Xioake at the press conference. While TOT plans to forge ahead with the e-auction for its Bt17.44-billion project to establish a nationwide third-generation telecom network on
Friday, it remains to be seen whether it can achieve this goal in the face of a possible lawsuit by the disqualified bidders.
A telecom industry source, while declining to elaborate, said 'an attempt' was also being made to delay the auction.
According to a primary qualification examination by TOT, the SL consortium of Loxley, Samart, Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei Technologies and the AU consortium of Advanced Information Technology, Alcatel-Lucent (Thailand) and United Communication Industry are the two qualified bidders. The two disqualified bidders are the Ericsson-AS Associate Engineering (1964) and Forth Corp-ZTE consortia.
TOT informed Ericsson's consortium on January 14 and Forth-ZTE on January 19 about their preliminary disqualifications and gave them three days after the notifications to appeal against the ruling. If TOT did not consider their appeals, that would amount to final disqualification.
Both have petitioned the Prime Minister's Office and the Information and Communications Technology Ministry on the matter.
Another telecom industry source said the Ericsson consortium had considered bringing the case to the court.
Given that this is TOT's biggest project in many years, no potential bidder wants to miss the chance to take part. Samart Corp is eager to clinch the whole project, which would help boost its ICT business revenue by Bt6 billion this year.
ZTE (Thailand) managing director Zhang Xioake said yesterday that ZTE would bring the case to the court once it was officially informed by TOT that it is disqualified. But he declined to provide details as it is consulting a lawyer on the case.
According to ZTE, it was disqualified because of its proposal for core capacity of the network higher than required by the bid's Terms of Reference (TOR). Last Friday, the company submitted an appeal to TOT to confirm its full compliance with the TOR.
"It's not a mistake to provide more than the TOR," Zhang said.
Also last Friday, ZTE petitioned the PM's Office, the ICT Ministry and the TOT board that the result was unfair to ZTE and the qualifications of some bidders were doubtful, which should not be ignored by TOT. It added that more consortia competing in the bid would benefit TOT.
Earlier, there was a rumour that Samart's qualifications contradicted the TOR, which bans companies doing business in competition with TOT from joining the bid. Samart president Watchai Vilailuck argued that the company had never competed with TOT.
China's ZTE has set a revenue target for its Thai subsidiary of US$160 million (Bt4.95 billion) this year, compared with ZTE Thailand's revenue of $55 million last year.
When asked if it could meet the revenue target if it fails to take part in the TOT 3G project, Zhang said the company would try its best to meet the goal. He added that there was huge business opportunity in the mobile and broadband network markets here.
The TOT panel disqualified the Ericsson-led consortium for the absence of catalogues for antenna-related products in its proposal.
Ericsson Thailand sent three letters last week to TOT to clarify the case, one of which asked why that apparent oversight had not been raised during a meeting with TOT representatives on January 14 to discuss the Ericsson proposal. The consortium should have been notified of this matter during the meeting so that it could rectify the situation, it argued.

-- The Nation 2011-01-26