FITEL, Taiwan's PHS operator, went bankrupt with NT$4.8B in debt

First International Telecom (FITEL) was a Taiwanese telecom operator that launched the PHS (Personal Handy-phone System) mobile service in May 2001. At its peak, FITEL served 1.5 million subscribers in Taiwan, offering a low-cost alternative to GSM mobile phones with a focus on the northern Taiwan market including Taipei, Taoyuan, and Hsinchu.

The company's technology was its fatal weakness. PHS was a Japanese-developed standard that never achieved global scale, and as 3G networks expanded rapidly in Taiwan, FITEL's limited coverage and lack of data capability made it increasingly uncompetitive. By 2012, the company had shut down its central and southern Taiwan operations and reduced its 12 retail stores to zero by June 2014.

FITEL filed for court-supervised reorganization in September 2008, which was approved in March 2009. The reorganization plan was confirmed in December 2010, but the company could not turn around. It needed approximately NT$2 billion to upgrade its network to XGP (next-generation PHS), but could not raise the funds. During the five-year reorganization period, FITEL accumulated an additional NT$1 billion in debt on top of its existing liabilities.

On December 18, 2014, the Taipei District Court terminated the reorganization and declared FITEL bankrupt. The company had total debt of NT$4.8 billion as of August 2014. It owed NT$17 million in unpaid wages and severance to its employees. From over 100 staff in August 2014, the workforce had shrunk to about 60 by November 2014. The remaining 600,000 subscribers — of whom only about 100,000 were still paying — lost service when the NCC revoked FITEL's frequencies on March 31, 2015.