The past year has not seen the best of the telecom industry in Pakistan, and quite a few jitters have been experienced both by the subscribers as well as the companies themselves. The biggest news of the year however will be “SingTel” taking over “Warid Telecom”, it is official now that the 30% stake holders will be taking more stakes from Warid.
The news was around from past few months that SingTel is to take more stakes of the Abu Dhabi Group’s Warid Telecom. Sources from Warid are now confirming that the deal is sealed and it shall be made public soon. SingTel shall take over Warid within next two weeks [1].
SingTel is a Singapore based company that is serving more than 20 countries at present. In Singapore alone is has had a 128 years of operating experience and has played an important part in the cities development.
Warid has been now around for quite a long time it still seemed to have trouble in capturing the market, the major fact being that its rival companies such as mobilink, ufone and telenor have been here for a much longer period, in fact mobilink are the pioneers of telecom in Pakistan. Another prime reason is that the “value added services” (vas) offered by Warid to its customers are not as lucrative as others and adding to the dilemma the promotion team is not also doing a very good job, where most ads focus the younger generation, ads by Warid seem a little under par.
Having said all this, the situation will not be totally a chaos for SingTel, with many years of experience and a mobile market of over 17,143,722 Warid subscribers they will have a lot of ground to play on.
The first glimpse of improvement can already be seen with the recent VAS release by Warid, the promotion is also being done in an improved and refined form, hopefully this “pre-launch” maneuver by SingTel would give them a good head-start, and the Warid subscribers might at last get a sigh of relief.
The major concern of SingTel will still be that they are entering the Pakistani telecom market at a time when uncertainty is the order of the day, this is one major issue that they will have to deal with, also the subscribers will be having a lot of expectations and SingTel has to live up to it so that it can extend the numbers to a new landmark.
The telecom sector may look all bad in Pakistan but still there is a lot to look for, according to the latest release by PTA the mobile subscriber market has crossed the 90 million mark, also there are high chances that the 3G license will be out by the end of December this year which is a huge indication of the regaining health of Pakistan’s telecom market.
There are a few speed breakers that SingTel will face during its initial phase but being a major role player in the telecom world and with firm determination and professional knowledge they will hopefully overcome the problems and bloom to excellence.
