By Jo Best, 3 September 2003 16:41
NEWS The latest instalment in the 3G soap opera has seen a surprising misfortune plague Hutchison's Italian arm, 3 Italia. The operator has seen its stock of phones sell out leaving it without handsets to give the customers clamouring to subscribe to its third-generation service. While 3 Italia's parent company has recently ordered a three million-strong shipment of 3G handsets, with half of them destined for the Italian firm, the phones won't be available for weeks, according to a report from Reuters. Vincenzo Novari, 3 Italia's chief executive, told Reuters that he did not plan to follow the strategy of 3 in the UK of slashing tariffs to drive take up and said that if the company had 500,000 handsets there would be the same number of consumers ready to sign up. The company's consumer base also differs widely from its UK equivalent. Previously, take up had been among cutting edge consumers who wanted to get their hands on the very latest piece of kit but new users originate in the more rural southern half of Italy, where customers use 3G for video chats with relatives who have moved north. 3 Italia has signed up 300,000 subscribers since March and, despite the setback, execs still claim it will break the one million user barrier by the end of the first quarter next year.
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