Philippines Firm Buys Blue Ocean Stake

BLUE Ocean Wireless, a Dublin-based marine telecommunications firm, has sold a 30pc stake to the Philippines Smart Communications for an undisclosed sum.

Blue Ocean has a global mobile communication system for the merchant maritime sector. It delivers the worlds first nautical GSM network that supports full voice and text services, it said.

The Philippine companys move is aimed at serving its growing wireless satellite phone customers, especially those among the worlds 1.2million seafarers, according to the company.

It added that around 40pc of the worlds seafarers are Filipinos and that Smart sees the Blue Ocean purchase as an important complementary service to its prepaid wireless satellite phone service.

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