Mobile providers eye world market

Domestic mobile service providers are seeking ways to expand abroad as the local phone market becomes saturated, say market watchers.

By 2020, the miitary-run mobile provider Viettel expects to provide services to around a billion people with revenue from foreign markets five times greater than domestic revenues.

In 2010, its total revenue from investments abroad totalled nearly VND4.3 trillion (US$208 million), with profits reaching VND652 billion ($30 million).

In 2007, Viettel established its Viettel Global unit with an investment of VND3 trillion (US$145 million).

Viettel then launched its mobile phone network in Cambodia in 2009 under the trademark Metfone, after spending about a-year-and-a-half developing its network infrastructure. Eight months later, Viettel launched its Unitel network in Laos.

In April 2010, Viettel concluded a US$59 million deal to buy a 70-per-cent stake in a telecom in Haiti.

Viettel deputy general director Tong Viet Trung said the company was developing infrastructure and upgrading a fixed-line network in Haiti and would be installing about 1,000 base transceiver stations there.

In the second quarter of this year, Viettel officially began providing mobile services in Haiti, with Trung saying it planned to pour an additional $300 million into the Haitian market in the future.

Among Viettel’s other global investments were a 60-per-cent stake in Bangladesh’s Teletalk mobile network at a cost of $300 million, and its Movitel venture in the African nation of Mozambique.

During the next five years, Movitel will invest over $400 million in a bid to provide services to approximately 85 per cent of the population of Mozambique. Viettel is also eyeing the market in Peru.

Meanwhile, Mobifone CEO Le Ngoc Minh also said that his firm had ambitions to expand in overseas markets and become one of the top 10 mobile service providers in Asia, providing services to approximately 200 million people.

While overseas expansion in the current economy was difficult, Mobifone was a professional and high-quality service provider that would be successful in the right markets, commented former deputy minister of Information and Communications Mai Liem Truc.

Viet Nam Post and Telecommunications (VNPT) Group, which operates both Mobifone and Vinaphone, has also launched a number of investments abroad through its VNPT Global unit, established in May 2008 with a registered capital of VND200 billion ($9.8 million).

According to the Ministry of Information and Communications, Viet Nam has about 98.2 million mobile subscribers, equivalent to 113.4 subscribers per 100 inhabitants.

By April of this year, Viet Nam had added 26 new investment projects abroad with a registered capital of US$1.74 billion, said Foreign Investment Agency director Do Nhat Hoang. The country’s total investment abroad has totalled 600 projects with a total registered capital of $10 billion and disbursed capital of over $2 billion.

Vietnamese enterprises have invested in 53 countries and territories, including in Europe, North America and Australia, Hoang said, with diversified investments in such sectors as petroleum, electricity, mining, handicrafts, agriculture and food processing, and manufacturing, as well as telecommunications. — VNS

Tags: Vietnam Telecom, Vietnam telecom maket