THEIR sleek yachts border the Cannes shoreline. By night they party with champagne and cocktails and all hope to leave clutching an award which will make their career.

But these are not Hollywood A-listers and this is not the film festival for which the Côte d’Azur town has become famous.

In fact this is 3GSM World Congress, the now extraordinarily glitzy gathering of the mobile phone industry.

Over the next three days 35,000 people will descend on Cannes for the event. With an array of whizzy gadgets and super advanced new phones being revealed it is every aerial head’s dream. The delegates are drawn from across the mobile industry, from major operators such as T-Mobile, Vodafone and Orange to the less sexy mast builders and billing system providers.

While the pinstriped financiers and earnest technology geeks might not have the allure of the film set, do not be deceived. The event, the only major event in the telecoms calendar, is every bit as lavish as the film festival with billions of pounds of business at stake.

In a good year a mobile equipment maker can complete a whole year’s procurement at the 3GSM event. But to do so, it must stand out from the crowd. Only the micro companies will do business from the conference centre.

The big players hire out the same yachts that are home to the film set each year. They use them as floating platforms on which to conduct business by day and hold lavish parties by night. The conventional mobile wisdom, that smaller is better, is turned on its head with companies competing for the biggest and sleekest yacht.

Siemens, the German conglomerate, has outdone its rivals, boasting a vehicle that is less yacht, more luminous floating gin palace. At regular intervals delegates are picked up from the shore and rowed across to the boat.

Intel, the chip maker, has simply hired out one of the town’s most famous bars, the Far Falla, for the week. That way they are guaranteed to attract potential clients in the evenings, when some of the most valuable business will be conducted.

Other handset makers have hired suites in the Art Deco Martinez hotel. The cost — thousands of euros for the week — can be recouped easily once the orders start flooding in. Desperate to get their gadgets written about, the exhibitors will influence any way they can. All press and analyst conferences are held in hotels and lavish pavilions and marquees. Even the media centre is sponsored with free internet access — and drinks — for journalists.

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