Telstra vows better services for PH

Australia’s Telstra Corp. Ltd. has offered a glimpse into its strategy to enter the Philippines, citing attractive margins and the “significant opportunity” to compete with incumbent players in providing “better quality” high-speed Internet services amid explosive demand.

Telstra CEO Andy Penn, during the company investor day this week, also cited the gap in terms of providing reliable services to business customers in the Philippines.

Telstra said it was willing to invest “less than” $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in a venture with diversified conglomerate San Miguel Corp., which the company described as a “very strong partner.”

SMC president Ramon Ang confirmed that figure on Friday while clarifying that talks were still ongoing with Telstra.

Nevertheless, Penn talked about their interest in the Philippines, and how their entry here was deemed a “better immediate opportunity” than other targets, like Burma (Myanmar).

“The Philippines itself from a mobiles market perspective is interesting, because there are only two incumbent operators. Obviously one never underestimates their competitors, but there’s many markets elsewhere in the region where there’s six, or seven or eight operators,” Penn said in a transcript recorded from the briefing on Oct. 29.

He was referring to the current duopoly here between Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. and Globe Telecom. PLDT and Globe are the main players in a country of about 100 million, a large portion of which are under 35 years old and consuming large amounts of data via smartphones and tablet devices.

“You will see that the opportunity there for a new operator to provide a much better quality service over an LTE network over better spectrum, I think there’s a significant opportunity,” Penn added.

He declined to comment on timing but he noted that the Philippines would help deliver growth for the company over the long-term. For businesses in the region, Penn cited rising demand for new products like unified communications, cloud services and security.

“Customers don’t want just connectivity. They actually want productivity and business solutions,” he said.

“We can transform their business models, and in growth markets, what customers are more interested in are those types of solutions,” Penn said. “We’ve built up a really fantastic set of capabilities, and I think it will be an instrumental part of our growth over the next five years.”