Deutsche Telekom (DT) confirmed earlier newspaper reports on Friday that it has pulled out of the Ceske radiokomunikace tender. This could be potentially good news for Cesky Telecom (should DT turn out to be interested in CT rather than CR). Czech MF Dnes newspaper also reported on Saturday that Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst is also out of the CR tender. Judging from the list of companies that showed preliminary interest in CR earlier this year, this would leave TeleDanmark, Telecom Italia, Vivendi and Emerging Markets Partnership as the four short-listed bidders (the number of short-listed bidders was officially released last week, their names were not). The four bidders are scheduled to submit binding bids in January, and the winner is supposed to be selected by the end of January. We feel that the presence of some “big” names among the four is strong enough to result in a competitive tender for Ceske radiokomunikace.
(Ondřej Daťka)