Business

Thursday September 20, 2012

Exciting growth prospects for DiGi.com

By DANIEL KHOO


danielkhoo@thestar.com.my

OSLO: DiGi.com Bhd remains an important part of Norwegian telecoms company Telenor Group in Asia and the company is in a period of “solid growth” which is expected to continue moving forward, according to group CEO John Fredrick Baksaas.

“For Asia we are looking forward to a 10% point plus a double-digit in topline growth in all our established operations. We see some changing trends here and there but the overall picture is that the group-wide factor has been there consistently throughout this whole period,” Baksaas said at the Telenor Capital Markets Day presentation at its headquarters here yesterday.

“We will maintain a good growth factor in (our) Asian market moving forward,” Baksaas said.

Telenor states in its presentation slides made available to journalists and financial analysts that its solid revenue growth thus far have been driven by Asia in part and it is focused today on investing in networks for the future.

Telenor and its other business units will also focus on two main operational ambitions moving forward to monetise on mobile data and continuous improvement by being a cost-efficient mobile network operator aiming to continue delivering growth above their peers.

“There is an industry feature where mobile data is growing tremendously. We need to change the pricing and product network settings accordingly. The new pricing features need to reflect the underlying consumption on the data networks,” Baksaas said.

On this backdrop, Baksaas said that operators such as Telenor and its other geographical business units needed to try to “boost data growth as much as we can.”

Meanwhile, Telenor said efficiency programmes were in place in all its business units while execution is the “key to reach targets.”

The company and its business units target an operating expenditure to sales figure of 35% as opposed to 36.8% in the last 12 months and 37% in the year 2011.

“We are in a resourceful industry, we have high spending in many areas. But in a three-year perspective it should definitely be possible to work on how we operate and also (achieve) efficiency gains of 5 billion Norwegian krone (RM2.68bil). Should everything be equal, we should be able to improve cashflow margins,” Baksaas said.

DiGi.com is a 49%-owned company of Telenor and is the third largest mobile phone operator in Malaysia presently.

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