Lebanon’s first mobile phone auction took place at the Movenpick Hotel on October 3, although it wasn’t the auction Lebanese have been waiting for.
In a scene more evocative of recent auctions for license plates in the Gulf, more than 100 deep pocketed individuals and their proxies paid $200 for the opportunity to bid on 33 ‘platinum’ MTC Touch phone numbers.
The crowd was mostly male and Lebanese, with a sprinkling of Emiratis, Qataris and Kuwaitis. They smoked cigars and munched on free sushi during the auction registration. After the national anthem signaled the auction’s start, the auctioneer announced the first “beautiful” phone number and bidding kicked off to whistles and applause as young women in taut black dresses carried card board signs announcing the number offered.
The highest bid went to an anonymous buyer, who paid $450,000 for the mobile number 70.707070.
Many buyers declined to identify themselves, or their clients, and some came for personal reasons. A buyer named Eli paid $80,000 for the number 70.696969. As he wrote a check for the $20,000 deposit, he said it was a number that was “special” to him — and supposedly not for the nefarious reasons the number brings to mind. “It’s like a work of art,” he said. “It’s unique. It identifies you forever, like a license plate or a domain name.”
Numbered investment
Other bidders bought the numbers as an investment. “It’s like the real estate,” said one bidder who asked to remain anonymous.
“Somebody might have corporate reasons — like tele-shopping,” said one representative of a telecommunications company, who also declined to give his name. “You can sell the number to a company, and then they put it on TV or billboards. It’s easy to remember; it has commercial value. “
Businessman Abdul Rahman Bandakji purchased 70.666666 for $225,000, and said he will not have to advertise to find potential buyers.
“They will come to me directly,” he said. “They will try to call this number and then they will know who the owner is.”
Fabio Al Khoury stood nearby and watched as buyers paid their deposit and received their receipts. He said he paid $200 to attend as a spectator, not to buy a number. But he knew plenty of wealthy Lebanese who would shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a phone number because it’s a status symbol.
“Some people, they got the money and want to show off,” he said.
Gilbert Najjar, head of the Ministry of Telecommunication’s Owner Supervisory Board, said he did not feel odd about the government pandering to peoples’ vanity.
“If they’re willing to put money into it, we’re willing to help the whole community through your vanity,” he said.
By evening’s end, the auction had raised approximately $2.5 million, Telecommunications Minister Jebran Bassil said. According to MTC Touch, if the numbers had been sold outright, they would have gone for $550 dollars apiece, and netted a total of $18,000 — but that system had become corrupt. A secondary black market developed around ‘platinum’ numbers involving pay-offs to employees at the telecom companies and ministry officials. Bassil said the goal of the auction was to squash that black market and make the telecom sector more transparent.
“We can say, now it’s a clean system,” Bassil said. “It’s a cleaner environment for the cellular, for the telecom and this is a first step; we will do a lot more in the future.”
Ministry officials say it is also a first step toward installing faith in the transparency of the much bigger auction that is expected to be held in the coming months for Lebanon’s two mobile network licenses. But for now, Bassil said the $2.5 million raised from the ‘platinum’ number auction will be used to improve the mobile network. He said he hopes Alfa will hold a similar auction in the coming months.
MTC touch auction results:
- 70.707070: $450,000
- 70.777777: $400,000
- 70.666666: $225,000
- 70.888888: $170,000
- 70.666999: $40,000
- 70.666333: $35,000
- 70.666600: $20,000
- 70.711117: $16,000
- 70.688886: $9,000
