IT IS barely six months since 3, Britain’s newest mobile-phone company, opened its shops to consumers. As the first to offer video calls and other “third-generation” mobile services, the company ought to be flush with optimism and enthusiasm.

Yet those are not the feelings that emanate from 3’s Covent Garden headquarters. The company seems paranoid, made weary by the scepticism with which it is viewed by rivals, analysts, retailers and the media.

Consider its latest advertising campaign. To the accompaniment of Marc Bolan’s Children of the Revolution, 3’s television commercial shows images of scientific and other advances that were initially dismissed as wrong or unworkable.

So a picture of the Earth is followed by the caption: “They said it was flat.” Footage of the Wright brothers’ first attempt at flight provokes the response: “They said it couldn’t be done.” Most poignantly, a picture of a 1980s businessman with an unfeasibly large mobile phone is followed by: “They said it would never catch on.”

The ad ends with the pay-off line: “What do they know?” Full marks for defiance; rather less for the coherence of the message. With fewer than 200,000 customers, many viewers must be left wondering what 3 is and what it does.

But this is not the strangest thing about the ad. The expensive campaign is running when the company has virtually no phones to sell.

3 has run out of the NEC handsets that have accounted for the bulk of sales so far and has only limited supplies of two new phones from Motorola.

The consequence is that 3’s sales have plummeted in recent weeks. Industry sources reckon the company is signing up some 2,500 new customers a week, down from perhaps 15,000 in June and July. “They must have well under 200,000 customers,” says one rival.

Unless 3 can find more 3G phones, it has no hope of meeting the target, imposed by its controlling shareholder Hutchison Whampoa, of having 1m customers by the end of the year. This is privately acknowledged by some members of its UK management team.

One person who knows 3’s management well says: “It’s very difficult to find the truth within the organisation. A lot of this is a cultural problem about not losing face. People continue to have to say things like ‘a million customers by the end of the year’. It’s Walter Mitty land.”

The company is in dispute, to differing degrees, with both its minority shareholders, NTT DoCoMo of Japan and KPN Mobile of the Netherlands. Both companies may seek to sell their stakes in the next six months.

In its short history, 3 has developed a reputation as the phone company without any phones — and for scoring own goals.

This time last year the company refused to acknowledge that it would miss its deadline to launch before the end of 2002. Almost as one, the rest of the industry insisted that