JAKARTA, Indonesia—SingTel Mobile confirmed that it purchased an additional 12.7-percent stake in Indonesia’s Telkomsel for US$429 million from PT Telkom, giving it a 35-percent stake in the mobile operator.
Telkom’s stake will reduce to 65 percent. SingTel bought its original 22.3-percent stake from KPN Mobile last year.
Telkomsel had more than 3 million subscribers and a 50-percent market share at the end of December.
The news follows SingTel Mobile’s disclosure of its growth and future strategy to fund managers at the end of March regarding the end of the financial year.
The key to SingTel Mobile’s financial success for the period lies in its strategy of maintaining high-value customers. This strategy included a recent revamp of its mobile price plans to keep up with customers’ needs, involving an increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) and decrease in churn rate to 1.8 percent in the third quarter of fiscal year 2001-2002 compared with churn of 2.2 percent within the same period last year.
Furthermore, SingTel Mobile’s regional strategy has shown a significant contribution to its revenues, as the six mobile operators in the Asia-Pacific region in which SingTel Mobile holds shares, reported an aggregate 69-percent growth in subscribers. India’s Bharti led the growth with a 129-percent increase in subscribers compared with the same period last year. Philippine’s Globe led in terms of earnings with a 156-percent increase for nine months of 2001 compared with the same period in 2000.
According to a report from Merrill Lynch, mobile subscribers in the six countries in which SingTel Mobile has subsidiaries—Singapore, Indonesia, India, Philippines, Thailand, Australia—is expected to increase from 30 million subscribers in 2000 to 116 million in 2005.
