BANGKOK, Thailand-After years of war and political instability, Cambodia and its 12 million people have entered a period of relative calm. With its economy starting to grow once more, demand for telephony services has jumped.
The country’s service of choice is the mobile phone. Exploding from a flimsy base of 14,500 customers in 1996, the mobile customer base is rapidly approaching 250,000. And while this is only 2-percent penetration, the mobile market is 10 times larger than the languishing fixed-line market.
With four mobile operators-MobiTel, Samart, Shinawatra, and CamTel-it is reasonable to expect a competitive market. However, MobiTel has claimed a hefty 71 percent of subscribers. The market leader is owned by Cambodia GSM, a joint venture between Millicom International Cellular, locally owned Royal Group and the Ministry of Post & Telecommunications (MPTC). After launching Cambodia’s first GSM 900 MHz network in 1997, MobiTel quickly captured half the mobile market and has continued to grow.
MobiTel’s strong performance has been due to effective marketing and a successful prepaid initiative. MobiTel’s market push was helped in 1999, when it launched its prepaid CELLcard, and its main rivals Samart and Shinawatra both suffered setbacks in introducing their prepaid models.
MobiTel has continued to push prepaid as its main lever to business growth. If there has been a weakness in this strategy, MobiTel appears to be picking up a disproportionate amount of the bottom end of the market. MobiTel’s revenue is estimated at a little more than half the market total.
With almost 20-percent market share, number two operator Samart is a joint venture between Thailand’s Samart, Telekom Malaysia and the MPTC. Having operated an NMT 900 MHz network since 1992, the company launched its GSM 900 MHz system in 1999. With the offer of big discounts to subscribers who migrate to its new GSM service, Samart has been winding down its NMT 900 MHz network and pricing aggressively.
Samart’s GSM prepaid system was introduced in 1999 with lower prices than MobiTel’s. The company encountered problems with the rights to its chosen prepaid technology. This seriously slowed its push into the marketplace. By 2000, however, the migration strategy started to prove effective, with net growth of 71 percent in its customer base.
Thai company Shinawatra owns and operates Cambodia Shinawatra. After launching its GSM 1800 MHz network in 1998, Shinawatra won respectable market share. Shinawatra started promoting a prepaid product in 1999, before it had its prepaid system operational. The product was seriously late, and Shinawatra lost considerable momentum in the fiercely competitive market. A year of strong growth in 2000, however, saw the third-ranked Shinawatra with 9-percent market share, and it hopes to increase that share.
Cambodia Mobile Telephone (CamTel), a joint venture between CP Group and the MPTC, with its dwindling customer base, is a non-event in the mobile market. In 1993, the company launched its AMPS network, but was subsequently swamped by the arrival of GSM operators. CamTel has been granted a TDMA license, but has yet to implement TDMA service.
MobiTel looks set to continue its domination of the market. It will benefit from the Cambodian government’s opening of the market, which first began in the early 1990s. MobiTel was awarded a license to operate a second international gateway. It also appears MobiTel will be licensed as an Internet service provider (ISP) in 2002. The integration of competitive international rates and a range of Internet services with its high-profile mobile service will ensure MobiTel remains unchallenged for some time to come.
