Myanmar will become the second largest market for the Qatari telecom firm Ooredoo, its regional director said at a press conference in Yangon on Friday.
“Indonesia is the largest market for our
company. Myanmar will become the second largest. I believe the
[Myanmar’s telecom] market is worth over US$2 billion a year,” Nicholas
Swierzy, Ooredoo’s Director for Asia Region, told Eleven Media.
Ooredoo, formerly known as QTel or Qatar
Telecom, has recently won a 15-year telecommunications license in
Myanmar, one of the world’s last telecoms frontiers.
He pledged that Ooredoo will deliver the
best customer service and the best network in Myanmar and it will
respond to the negative posts on the Myanmar social network sites with
its best services.
“[People] can use the social network
sites as they wish. For us, services are the most important for the
customers,” said Ross Cormack, a senior representative of Ooredoo.
Myanmar promises huge growth in its
fledgling telecommunication sector as less than 10 percent of the over
60 million population have access to cellphones.
Ooredoo’s representative said Myanmar
will see growth in gross domestic products (GDP) along with the increase
in the country’s mobile and internet penetration rates.
He said Ooredoo will launch the 3G
services in Myanmar as soon as possible and it will announce phone
calling charges just before the launching.
On June 27, Myanmar government announced
that Ooredoo and Telenor Mobile Communications of Norway are the “two
successful applicants in the nation-wide Telecommunications Licence
Award Process”.
They were selected from a shortlist of
11 bidders, whittled down from more than 90 companies and consortia that
expressed interest in entering one of the Asia's untapped telecom
markets.
Observers said it was a competitive
bidding process as Ooredoo and Telenor had to compete against the
international telecom companies like Singtel, KDDI Corp, Digicel, MTN,
Axiata, Bharti Airtel and Viettel.
France's Orange and Marubeni Corp of
Japan were selected as the back-up if one of the two licence winners
failed to meet post-selection requirements, the Ministry of
Communications said.
The two chosen operators will need to
finalize the details of the license with Myanmar government by September
and launch services within the following nine months.
source: Eleven Myanmar
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