KUALA LUMPUR: The country’s top three mobile telecommunication operators, or the Big Three, are in for more musical chairs games over the next few years as competition gets more intense.
Maxis Bhd, which led the mobile space for most part of the past decade, could be entering into an unfamiliar territory by the end of this month.
Come May 25 when Celcom Axiata Bhd’s numbers are released, Maxis — controlled by tycoon Ananda Krishnan — may have the smallest subscriber base among the incumbent operators.
As at March 31, official numbers revealed that DiGi.Com Bhd had 12.34 million subscribers, slightly ahead of Maxis’s 12.31 million subscribers.
Celcom, a wholly-owned unit of Axiata Group Bhd, had 12.25 million subscribers as at December 3 2015. It is simply 86,000 subscribers away from DiGi and 60,000 subscribers away from Maxis.
This means a net addition of more than 86,000 in the first quarter would give Celcom the lead in the market and ultimately put Maxis in the rare third position.
The question now is: Can Celcom capture that number?
Analysts seem to think this is achievable. One reason for the optimism is that Maxis has recorded a net loss of 384,000 subscribers. At the same time, DiGi has registered a net addition of 211,000 subscribers.
“It is possible that Celcom will regain the top position in the mobile space as the company is deemed as the biggest beneficiary from Maxis’s recent social media backlash,” said JF Apex Securities Bhd in an email.
The brokerage firm said mobile users switched plan partly due to lower consumer sentiment and higher cost of living, which made them more price-sensitive.
“Maxis has suffered from customer dissatisfaction and Celcom has just happened to be there with more attractive plans, in terms of lower price per gigabyte (GB) of data, and benefited from the fall,” JF Apex added.
MIDF Amanah Investment Bank Bhd analyst Martin Foo, however, has a different view.
“It will be hard to determine whether Celcom could regain the top position in the mobile space. This was mainly due to the intense competition in the market. The telcos (telecommunication companies) are revising their respective plans at a much faster pace this year compared to earlier years,” he said.
While the analysts’ leadership expectation is more on Maxis and Celcom, the other player in the Big Three remains unfazed with the tougher competition, even with the upcoming entry of Telekom Malaysia Bhd’s (TM) webe.
DiGi chief executive officer (CEO) Albern Murty said the company would remain focused on its business strategy of providing better Internet experience to its customers and maintain its current market position.
“We welcome competition. They will have their own strategy. But, for us, we just focus on ours and we believe that we will be fine.
“We are going to continue to strengthen our engagement with customers and deliver relevant products to the market, and continue our focus on the Internet,” he added.
DiGi last year saw its LTE subscribers grow to 2.3 million, representing 19 per cent of its total subscriber base.
Currently, DiGi’s 4G LTE network serves more than 72 per cent of the population. It is supported by an expanded fibre network of 6,600km, bringing high-speed Internet access to 131 major cities and towns, with key market centres averaging 95 per cent population coverage.
webe, meanwhile, has been upgrading its mobile network as it prepares for the launch of its 4G service “very” soon, according to its CEO C.C. Puan.
webe is the rebrand of P1 (Packet One Networks), which was bought by TM in 2014.
The launch of webe services will see TM re-enter the mobile space after an eight-year absence.
TM demerged its fixed-line and mobile units in 2008, with Celcom transferred to TM International, which was later renamed Axiata.
With webe’s purported low-cost postpaid plan that will include 1,000 voice minutes, 1,000 texts and 20GB of data at RM10 per month, the sector’s Big Three has another competitor to worry about.