Sprint Launches Global Venture Telecommunications Giant Teams Up With New Partners

Sprint Corp. and its European partners on Wednesday declared their joint worldwide telecommunications venture, Global One, open for business.

In a teleconference from Washington, Global One officials touted simplicity and coverage as the strengths of an operation they expect to have more than $800 million in revenue in its first year.

In trading Wednesday after the announcement, Sprint stock was up 37-1/2 cents at $41.12-1/2 a share on the New York Stock Exchange.

France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom are paying between $3.5 billion and $3.7 billion for a 20 percent share of Kansas City-based Sprint. The deal was first announced in June 1994, but it took more than 18 months to receive all the necessary regulatory approvals.

The new company is based in Reston, Va., and Brussels, Belgium, and has more than 2,500 employees worldwide. Executives say the venture already has a presence in more than 50 countries.

“Global One will make global communications simple for customers, offering access to the world through a single point of contact, a single point of support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and a single global network that is state-of-the-art,” Sprint chairman and chief executive William Esrey said. “No one else in the world is offering this unique level of service.”

Sprint and its American competitors, AT&T Corp. and MCI Communications Corp., all have taken on international partners as they chase the increasing volume of global voice, data and video traffic.

That traffic is increasing much faster abroad than in the United States.

Sprint’s partnership with telecommunication companies in France and Germany gives it a potentially larger market than MCI, which is paired with British Telecom, or AT&T, which has several smaller European partners, analyst Ted Levy said.

“There’s a tremendous amount of international traffic flowing from those countries to America and back,” said Levy, director of research for Essex Capital Markets in Rochester, N.Y.

“If you wanted to partner with any companies, Deutsch Telekom and France Telecom are two powerful companies to partner with.”

“My feeling is this is my favorite of the three,” said Scott Wright, an analyst for Argus Research in New York. “It’s got the two major European players under its tent and that’s certainly a positive.”

Kevin Brauer, president of Sprint Business, said Global One’s main targets are multinational businesses, other carriers who want to buy capacity on the partners’ lines, and to a lesser extent consumers.