The road to hell...

... is paved, as Dr. Johnson didn't ever say, with good intentions.

One such intention was set out here in the most recent DTW post, namely that this blog would review some of the predictions made in the Industry Outlook report that is made available for free downloading by Informa Telecoms & Media. The plan was to zero in on any predictions relating specifically to emerging markets and developing countries.


Two months have passed since that rash promise was made and not a peep has been heard from this once prolific blog - no fewer than 147 posts saw were published here in 2009.

Apologies, then, to anyone who has found DevelopingTelecomsWatch to be a useful source of news, commentary and speculation and who now wonders whether the blog has fizzled out of existence. Happily, for anyone that cares, this is not the case. That said, I do not expect to be writing anything like as often in 2010 than was the case last year. My commercial activities are, I am pleased to report, taking up far more time now, suggesting that this year will be more profitable than the one we have left behind us. I do hope that regular readers are facing this first year of a new decade with similar optimism.

Failure to deliver on good intentions notwithstanding, then, perhaps DTW and its writer are not on that proverbial road to hell.

What of our industry and its interests across emerging markets? Hellbound? Or good times ahead?

Belatedly, then, with two months of the new year having already passed, let's attempt to answer those questions by taking a look at a couple of the predictions made by the crystal ball gazers at Informa:

'So-called emerging markets will transition into a new phase of competition based on services and bring into question the validity of the term "emerging market" as it is understood in the telecoms sector today.'

Informa's report notes that "Until now, the term 'emerging market' in the context of the mobile sector has been used as a catch-all phrase to describe markets characterised by low penetration rates, a proliferation of mobile network operators, steep drops in the price of basic communications and resulting explosive mobile subscription growth."

This is familiar territory here at DTW. Numerous times, reference has been made to markets in which the price of mobile services has been squeezed down to a level that makes life very hard for some of the competing cellcos. In July last year, for example, this blog covered the decision of Millicom International Cellular to withdraw from all the Asian markets in which it once did business - Sri Lanka, Laos and Cambodia. The latter country certainly matches the Informa's report's reference to "a proliferation" of MNOs. No fewer than nine (!!) cellcos are currently fighting for business in a country with just 14.8 million inhabitants. Here they all are, with market share figures from Informa's WCIS product:

1. Cellcard (GSM, 42.12% market share - the operator in which Millicom had a stake)
2. Metfone (GSM, 18.86%, owned by Viettel of Vietnam)
3. Mfone (GSM/W-CDMA, 15.52%)
4. Hello (GSM, 13.38%, controlled by Axiata)
5. Star-Cell (GSM, 3.56%, part of the TeliaSonera group)
6. Beeline Cambodia (GSM, 2.90%, owned by Russia's Vimpelcom)
7. qb (W-CDMA, 1.95%)
8. Latelz (GSM, 1.32%)
9. GT-TELL/Excell (CDMA, 0.39%)

Regular readers may have spotted that from time to time I like to share video clips of telecoms operators' TV advertisments from around the world. Latelz (AKA Smart Mobile), as the list above suggests, is one player that may need some pretty compelling advertising if it is to become a more significant player. You decide how powerfully the Smart Mobile case is made by these:





Cambodia is a pretty extreme case, perhaps, but DTW has also examined a number of African markets which seem to be ripe for mobile market consolidation. I daresay there are many more around the world in much the same state.

While I am insinctively in favour of competitive environments which offer value and choice to consumers of mobile services, I do also sympathise when I speak with employees of operators that are struggling to improve shareholder value in the context of dramatically slashed prices. These guys, it sometmes seems to me, can feel as if they are on that proverbial inferno-bound round. If Informa's prediction is on the money, however, perhaps that fiery destination need not be reached this year.

On to the next prediction with an emerging markets/developing countries angle...

'Mobile banking efforts will continue to proliferate in emerging markets, but in the short-term these will be more important as a customer acquisition and retention tool than as a genuine driver of significant new operator revenue streams.'

The efforts made to date in this area got some coverage here last year. In May we noted that giant cellco Bharti Airtel was looking to tap into the big opportunity presented by the fact that 85% of the citizens of its Indian home market do not have bank accounts. By August, readers were invited to consider whether mobile operators would necessarily dominate the market for mobile banking services aimed at turning a profit while going some way to alleviating the poverty of subscribers in developing countries. An alternative that we discussed was the possibility of operator-neutral solutions gaining traction.

The chaps at Informa were have not been alone in keeping discussions of this sort on the agenda for 2010. Indeed, mobile banking in emerging markets got a mention during the plenary session of last month's Mobile World Congress. Simon Rockman of the Register noted, however, with some distaste, "that transforming the lives of millions of people by giving them bank accounts – something that can make the difference between eating and starving - didn't garner the same round of applause" as that received by the GSMA project aimed at making every mobile phone use the same charger."

Writing up his notes from the Congress the following week, Rockman also wondered at some of the number crunching around the scale of the m-banking opportunity. He noted that day four of event saw an assembly of the mobile money working group that has received USD 12.5m from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is working towards the GSMA's target of getting 20 million of the billion people who have a mobile phone but do not have a bank account onto the first rung of the financial ladder.

Ignacio Mas, writes Rockman, gave a detailed account of what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wants to achieve: "They wanted the very poor and insecure to be able to save", targeting people living on less than USD 2 per day. "As much as they have low subsistence incomes", reports Rockman, "the real problem is stability - they might only find work occasionally and have to eke out money until they next find work. Or if they are farmers they get paid seasonally at harvest time."

Without access to banks, continues Rockman, such people are very vulnerable: "They will often give the money to people they trust for safekeeping but these are people in a similar situation to themselves. Lack of stability means people get multiple jobs. They can't concentrate on what will get the best return and pull themselves out of poverty because they have to opt for stability."

This, and other challenges, blight the lives of so many people around the world that it does seem reasonable to suppose that a huge opportunity does exist for the telecoms industry to provide what the retail banking sector cannot in underdeveloped countries.

Well, I enjoyed finally finding the time to write something here after such a long hiatus - but will refrain from making rash promises about when the next article will appear. More soon, I hope, though.

The road to hell...

Cambodia's mobile price war: peace in sight?

Beeline Cambodia: late entrant doing battle in a fierce tariffs war

DevelopingTelecomsWatch depends on the indispensable Phnom Penh Post for news of all things Cambodian, quoting that organ quite liberally, for example, when donning a flak jacket to report on the mobile price war which has been gripping the southeast Asian country for months.

It was also via that esteemed news outlet that DTW learned this week that the Cambodian Government has tired of waiting for the country's numerous cellcos to end to their damaging tariffs battle. A long-awaited edict setting minimum tariffs was signed by the Government last Friday, telecoms Minister So Khun is quoted as saying.

"We offered free-market principles, but operators kept having conflicts with one another, so the government needs to have a hand in it," So Khun said. The government will suspend the licence of any operators that violate the minimum tariff set by the edict, he added.

The Cambodian mobile market is currently contested by no less than nine MNOs. If there is another country with a population under 15 million whose cellular sector is split so many ways, it does not spring immediately to mind. Of that crowd of cellcos, one, so far, has reacted positively to the imposition of a minimum tariff regime. The Phnom Penh Post quotes Simon Perkins, CEO of Axiata-controlled Hello, who says he supports the initiative "to bring some structure to the telecom tariffs, in the absence of the usual competition guidelines and rules that exist in a lot of markets".

This decision, of course, comes too late for Millicom International Cellular, which announced in July that its three Asian operations (in Sri Lanka and Laos as well as in Cambodia) were to be reclassified as assets held for sale. The Luxembourg-headquartered mobile group cited problems around ongoing profitability in these Asian markets as a key reason for selling up and focusing its efforts on its African and Latin American properties. As DTW reported in the summer, Millicom CEO Mikael Grahne appeared to attribute much of the blame for deteriorating profits at Cellcard, the Cambodian cellco in which Millicom has a 58.4% stake, to the disruptive market-entry strategies of latecomers to the country's mobile arena. The same DTW piece, however, noted that another major shareholder in Cellcard does not agree with Millicom's assertion that this is negatively impacting profitability: "[There are] no concerns on profitability from our side," said Mark Hanna, CFO of Royal Group, which owns a 38.5% stake in the cellco, denying in July that margins had become tighter.

Such was the confidence of the Royal Group in this assertion that the local Cambodian conglomerate agreed to acquire Millicom's stake in Cellcard. This confidence also seems to be shared now by the Royal Group's bankers. According to a Bloomberg article earlier this month, Royal Group has hired Standard Bank Group Ltd. and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. to arrange an 18-month bridging loan to help with the purchase of Millicom's share of the MNO.

The appetite of the Cambodian authorities for intervention in the mobile market does not end with tariff control.

Again, we are indebted to the Phnom Penh Post, this time for coverage of a debate around mobile network sharing in Cambodia.

Last month, the newspaper carried news of Minister So Khun calling for the country's MNOs to share infrastructure. So Khun said the initiative would avoid duplication of infrastructure, thereby reducing costs across the sector, as well as moderating the effect that mobile base stations are having on their surroundings.

"We do not want to see too many antennas dotted along roads in the future," said the Minister. Perhaps it would be too sarcastic to respond by asking "So why did you license nine mobile operators in a country of that size?"

Given that some of these nine are well-established players feeling the effects of the later entry of certain rivals, it seems reasonable to suggest that the response to any mandatory network infrastructure sharing might be rather mixed. As the Phnom Penh Post points out, the operators with an established presence in the market have spent many millions of dollars on infrastructure as part of their efforts to gain competitive advantage.

The Government has shared a draft of a proposed telecoms law one of whose provisions would be to make infrastructure sharing obligatory. The private sector response has been to agree that while there do exist benefits around cost reduction and environmental impact, market forces in Cambodia have not been given sufficient time to work.

"Mandatory facilities sharing will reduce the incentive on operators to build such infrastructure," said these recommendations. "This may result in less than the optimal number of towers being constructed such that when the operators commence infilling their networks to improve coverage and provide better service, they are unable to do so as all tower capacity has been filled."

DevelopingTelecomsWatch finds the mobile market of this particular Asian country to be fascinating. We'll keep watching.

Cambodia's mobile price war: peace in sight?

Millicom's Asian sell-off: two down, one to go

Vimpelcom's Beeline brand: next stop Laos

Back in late July, global emerging markets mobile group Millicom International Cellular announced that its Asian assets were up for sale. Since then, this blog has tracked other telecoms groups' interest in these operations.

The first confirmed transaction was the sale of Millicom's majority stake in Cambodian mobile operator Cellcard to another of the existing shareholders, the Royal Group. When Millicom first announced its intention to quit Cambodia, Mikael Grahne, the company's CEO, explained that this was partly due to the negative effect on profitability caused by the disruptive market-entrance strategies of the new players that have recently flocked to the Southeast Asian country's crowded mobile arena.

When DTW first covered this story, we saw that the Royal Group's CFO Mark Hanna was quick to dismiss any such concerns about profitability. We have also seen here, however, that in the months which have followed, Mr Hanna has himself felt the need to attack a new entrant for allegedly selling services below the cost of delivery. The apparently disruptive player in question is Beeline Cambodia, controlled by giant Russian mobile firm Vimpelcom.

As the dispute between mobile operators in Cambodia rumbles on acrimoniously, then, perhaps it is legitimate to wonder if a similar set of circumstances will unfold in neighbouring Laos, another country from which Millicom has been seeking to extract itself.

With a mobile penetration rate of just 27.14% (end of June, according to WCIS), Laos would appear to be quite attractive in terms of growth potential. WCIS estimates that Millicom's Tigo-branded operation has built a 17.01% share of current subscriptions since its own market debut back in 2003, when it became the third entrant.

The longest-established mobile offering in Laos is that of the country's incumbent fixed-line operator, Lao Telecom, in which the the Government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic holds a 51% stake. Via a company named Shenington Investments, the other stakeholders are Thai communications satellite operator Thaicom, ST Telemedia, and Qatari telecoms group Qtel.

While the later entrants have, of course, eroded Lao Telecom's share of the mobile market, this share has only fallen as far as the 60% mark - still a dominant position. I will not pretend to know a lot about the telecoms market of Laos, but I note that the country profile available from Australian research firm Buddecomm mentions that "the rate of regulatory reform continues to lag well behind industry development and has the potential to derail the progress already made if the reform is not speeded up." This, perhaps, explains the qualified success of those challenging the national incumbent telco in the mobile space and might be part of why Millicom preferred to focus its efforts elsewhere.

Undeterred by such challenges, however, is the purchaser of the 78% stake that Millicom International Cellular held in Tigo Laos. That purchaser, as I learned yesterday from TeleGeography, is none other than Russia's Vimpelcom, whose Cambodian Beeline-branded operation has been offering aggressively priced services and arousing the anger of its competitors in the process. If Vimpelcom is planning something similar in Laos, perhaps the arrival of Beeline's low-price offerings will accelerate the growth of the country's modest mobile penetration rate. It's also possible that any such strategy would cause the same friction as seen in Cambodia. Beeline comes to Laos and grows its SE Asia cluster. Let's see if there's a sting in the tale.

Regarding Millicom's plan to quit Asian markets and sharpen its focus on Africa and Latin America, just one task remains - the disposal of its asset in Sri Lanka. DTW has noted in previous articles that interest seems to be strong. The last I read about it, both India's BSNL and the UAE's Etisalat remain in what some are describing now as a "race" to buy Millicom's Sri Lankan operation.

Millicom's Asian sell-off: two down, one to go

Big trouble in Indochina

Cambodia's mobile operators are in for some serious wrangling and the country's consumers are in for some serious savings - for now, at least.

A week ago, courtesy of Cellular News, I learned that the southeast Asian country's cellcos have been at odds, with one MNO accusing another of offering loss-leading tariffs. The alleged offender is Sotelco, which is backed by Vimpelcom and which operates under the same Beeline brand familiar to mobile users in the CIS markets of Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Armenia. Making the accusations, according to a TeleGeography article on the same story, is Mark Hanna, CFO of the Royal Group, a Cambodian investment and development company whose assets include a stake in Cellcard, the mobile operator whose large share of the country's cellular market (currently 48.41% according to WCIS) has been steadily eroded by newer entrants over the last couple of years.

The Cambodian mobile market is something of a paradox. One on hand we have boosters such as the Royal Group proclaiming that Cambodia has "a booming economy, second in Asia only to China in double-digit GDP growth" and that it "enjoys a stable political situation, together with the most welcoming and liberal business, investment and trade environment in ASEAN." All of this sounds very attractive. On the other hand, Millicom International Cellular, which owns a majority stake in Cellcard, has opted to quit the Cambodian market, having found the level of competition to be excessive in the country's very crowded mobile sector.

Having written back in July about Millicom's decision to exit this and other Asian markets (also Laos and Sri Lanka), the last I heard was that the company has agreed to sell its stake in Cellcard to the Royal Group. Interest in Millicom's Sri Lankan operation, meanwhile, has been expressed by Indian state owned telco BSNL, which, along with fellow public sector operator MTNL, is also said to be mulling over a 46% stake in pan-MEA giant Zain (of which more here later, no doubt).

Certainly, the intensely competitive battle between Cambodia's nine (!!!) cellcos does seem to be cited as the reason for operators' sliding revenues in the country. One example of this, as reported by Steve Finch of the Phnom Penh Post reported late last month, comes from Axiata-backed Hello. While the Malaysian parent company recorded a 44% rise in net profit overall for Q2 2009, its Cambodia operation suffered from a "challenging" business environment, a recent statement said. According to Axiata, "major operators are facing intense competition on pricing, and new operators are offering free SIM cards and free minutes to capture market share." This has affected Hello to the tune of a 17.4% slide in 2Q 2009 revenues.

While Vimpelcom's operation is just the latest disruptive new entrant, this blog has discussed similar tactics on the part of another latecomer, Metfone, a subsidiary of Viettel, an operator from neighbouring Vietnam. Since its launch late last year, the Vietnamese-backed cellco has carved out an impressive 11.66% share of the Cambodian mobile subs market according to WCIS. Last time I covered this, it was stated that Metfone's market share was 17.47% - so I think the good people at WCIS have revised some of their June 2009 figures for Cambodia, doubtless in line with more recently received market intelligence. The lower figure, though, is still very solid. So I stand by the remark I made back in July about there probably not being many precedents worldwide for an operator making such a strong impact so quickly in such an already-congested market.

As discussed here before, Metfone has rapidly built a customer base through the distribution of free SIM cards and airtime, as bemoned by the good folks at Axiata. Further, and as I discussed in a March article on the links between telcos in countries with left-of-centre government and/or centrally planned economies, Viettel Deputy General Director Nguyen Manh Hung has been quoted as saying that Metfone intends to extend services to Cambodia's lower income groups and thereby "contribute to society." I have taken this to mean that the Vietnamese company, with its roots in the military establishment of a socialist republic, is free to interpret the profit motive rather differently than those of us who are compelled to think of shareholder value when we go to work every day.

I don't know if Metfone's very aggressive pricing is now a thing of the past - but it is Beeline Cambodia's actions that have been making the headlines of late and arousing the ire of the Royal Group.

Last Wednesday, the Phnom Penh Post reported that the Vimpelcom-backed operator had been accused of reneging on a promise to avoid selling services "below the cost of connecting across networks". It seems that while Beeline has ceased to make its controvesial 'Boom' tariff plan available only to new subscribers. The Royal Group's Mark Hanna contends that this violates the agreement Beeline struck with the country's regulator. Beeline Cambodia General Director Gael Campan is unrepentant. The operator sent text messages to all users already signed up for the 'Boom' tariff that the rate would remain "forever". Campan has also argued that it is not selling below cost, and that its pricing policy is little different from a supermarket selling most products for a profit with a number of promotions added to entice customers and build loyalty.

Application forms for Beeline’s Boom tariff. Photo: Sovan Philong, Phnom Penh Post

Campan has made accusations of this own, claiming that Cellcard has limited interconnection between the two networks throughout the heated dispute.

Despite the continuing disagreement, stated last Wednesday's Phnom Penh Post article, Campan has neither threatened legal action nor received word of Cellcard planning a lawsuit. Both sides, however, continues the article, have made claims of legal infringement. While Beeline has accused Cellcard of violating an interconnection contract, interconnection standards and therefore Cambodian regulations by blocking its network, Cellcard accuses Beeline of illegally using its rival's prefixes to get around interconnectivity issues. Hanna said Beeline had "violated national security and the ITU guidelines on the use of mobile prefixes".

Undeterred by criticism from rivals, Beeline Cambodia announced this week that the über-cheap 'Boom' tariff is to be followed with another very aggressive offering. Ith Sothoeuth of the ever-indispensable Phnom Penh Post writes that customers will only be charged for the first minute of any calls they make of up to 15 minutes' duration within the Beeline network. Under the "Super Zero" plan, the per-minute charge will kick in again after 15 minutes, while calls across networks will be charged at USD 0.06 per minute, compared with USD 0.05 per minute at all times on all networks on the controversial "Boom" plan, Beeline Commercial Director Benoin Janin told a press conference last Friday. "Super Zero" SIM cards will cost just USD 0.50 under a promotion running until December 31, though the Super Zero tariff will continue for already-qualified users indefinitely, or until the company changes its pricing policy, reports Sothoeuth.

Beeline's Campan, writes Sothoeuth, also said on Friday that he hopes to resolve the dispute with Cellcard and added that the connectivity issue would not help the Royal Group-controlled MNO in the long run. "It is a very fragmented market right now, and nobody has the majority of subscribers," he said. Cellcard, he continued "is not the biggest part of the market; the majority of subscribers are with the other operators. We want to work with them as much as possible, and if [they do] not want to give their subscribers access to Beeline customers, it's their problem, not ours." Tough talk - although, as we have seen from the WCIS numbers, it's only just about true that Cellcard does not own a majority of subs.

Following earlier musings here about Metfone's pricing and its effects on market value in Cambodia, this latest wrangle strengthens my feeling that the country's mobile scene is surely bound to see some degree of consolidation soon. Observing from an admittedly long distance, I'm inclined to think a competitive war of attrition cannot continue unchecked for very much longer. I wonder what prices Cambodia's mobile users will be paying when the number of service providers shrinks.

Big trouble in Indochina