PTCL to Invest Rs. 100 Billion in Next Five Years

PTCL will invest Rs. 100 billion in Pakistan in next five years, said Mr. Walid Irshaid in an interview with Business Recorder. He said that source of funding can be debt to equity combination, while the investment will be focused on variety of areas with in the company including expansion.

Mr. Irshaid said that PTCL was a state run monopoly telephone company before privatization, while new management is trying to transit the organization to make it become “The Telecom company of Pakistan” with integrated solutions.

For the purpose, new management right-sized the staff from 64,000 to 30,000 only, said Mr. Irshaid. He pointed that at time of privatization, PTCL’s main revenue generating source was voice, which is now shared by number of services including broadband, IPTV and other portfolio services.

Explaining the revenue streams, Mr. Walid Irshaid told:

• voice business is making 40 percent revenues for the company.
• Broadband segment shares 20 percent of PTCL’s revenues.
• Corporate enterprise solution unit is contributing roughly eight to ten percent to the revenues

PTCL president in his interview said that cellular companies effected PTCL in many ways: voice tariffs have drastically fallen, even for domestic calls and fixed line subscriptions have declined plus SMS services also took its toll on voice business. He confessed that without too many mobile network operators, PTCL’s growth in volumes would perhaps have been ten times more.

Speaking on the potential Pakistani broadband market has, Walid Irshaid said that with with 180 million people and in the middle of a youth bulge, every year, at least 5 to 10 million become potential broadband users. He revealed that average download capacity of Pakistani broadband user is 25GB, five times higher than average global "unlimited" download of only 5GB.

PTCL has plans to stretch its broadband services to 5 million users with minimum, guaranteed 10MB bandwidth for each user. “You’ll be shocked to know that folks in rural areas, who have bare access to basic facilities, are savvy internet users”, commented Mr. Irshaid.

Talking about taxes on telecom sector, Mr. Walid said that its not the tax which bothers him the most – it’s the power outages that present the real challenge to PTCL more than anything else! Running our operations for eighteen hours a day on fuel oil is a logistical and security nightmare.

In response to a question about InstaPhone’s license (expected to be auctioned in March 2012), Mr. Irshaid said that this is not conducive to the operators and the country to have another active MNO. He opined that one of existing operator can buy this license to have addition spectrum, or all existing operators can collectively buy the license to prevent further bleeding.

PTCL President, on another note, advised operators to allow allow national roaming among themselves, which according to him can greatly reduce the running costs and environmental issues. He emphasized that regulator should force national roaming as a regime.

Via Business Recorder

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