Winners:
- TDC ($118 million)
- Telia ($118 million)
- Orange ($118 million)
- Hi3G ($118 million)

Denmark's state telecom agency said on Thursday it awarded four licences for new mobile phone services at a surprisingly high price of 950 million crowns ($118 million) each. The winners of the auction were Danish telecoms operator TDC , Sweden's Telia , France Telecom-owned Orange and HI3G Denmark, a unit of a Hong Kong-based consortium controlled by Hutchison.

Five bids were received at the auction. The loser in the tender, Europe's first sealed bid auction for so called 3G licences, was Norway's Telenor .

Danish telecomms group TDC, Swedish group Telia and French-based operator Orange have been confirmed as participants in the sealed-bid tender for Denmark's four third generation (3G/UMTS) mobile phone licences.

By the close of the application period, at 1600 Danish time today (5 September), it was also clear that the Danish operator Sonofon had not participated in the auction, which is expected to raise DKK100-200m per licence.

The winners are expected to be announced in October.

The Danish government has announced that it is to offer four 3G licenses on September 5th, with a reserve price of US$57 million per license. Bidders will be required to pay 25% of the license fee immediately, with the remainder over the next ten years.

One of the conditions is that the networks independently build their networks to cover 80% of the population by 2009, limiting any network sharing to the sparsely populated 20% remaining.

Denmark has announced the terms for its license allocation, which will take place in September or at the latest in October. . The Ministry for IT and Research has said that it will charge a minimum price of EUR67.26m for each license and hopes to raise at least EUR270m from the sale of four licenses.

Four equal licenses of 2x15MHz paired spectrum plus 5 MHz unpaired spectrum.