Celcom confident of better 2H

KUALA LUMPUR: Celcom (Malaysia) Bhd is confident its revenue growth for the second half (2H) of this year would be better than the first half as it has performed well in June and July in terms of net advertising revenue and sales volume for its BlackBerry package.

“As announced on July 26, we are confident we will hit all our key performance indicators at the revenue, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA), profit after tax and minority interest (PATAMI) and return on capital employed (ROCE) levels,” said its chief executive officer Datuk Seri Shazalli Ramly after launching Celcom’s new mobile broadband service yesterday.

Celcom posted a net profit of RM398 million on the back of revenue totalling RM2.16 billion in the first half of 2006.

Shazalli said Celcom would be spending RM1 billion on capital expenditure this year.

On its newly-launched Celcom Broadband, he said that with the service, Celcom is now the only mobile operator in the country to offer daily unlimited mobile broadband services to its subscribers, making it the fastest mobile broadband provider with speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps based on high-speed data packet access (HSDPA) technology.

The new service comes in two different plans, namely the Daily Unlimited (for prepaid and postpaid users) and Monthly Unlimited (for postpaid users), both of which run on the GPRS or 3G networks.

The Daily Unlimited plan is priced at RM8 for 24-hour access with speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps while the Monthly Unlimited comes in a RM68 package per month with speeds of up to 384 kbps.

To improve its mobile broadband services, Celcom, which has the highest number of HSDPA-enabled sites in Malaysia, intends to increase the sites to over 2,000 by the end of this year. “We do have plans to roll out beyond 2,000 by year-end (from the current 1,815 sites),” said Shazalli.

On the challenges for its 3G service, he said the company had been in discussions with the Ministry of Energy, Water and Communications and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission to acquire more tower sites as quickly as possible.

He expects the take-up rate for its 3G service, which totalled 330,000 subscribers at end-June, to exceed the targeted 450,000 mark by year-end.

Shazalli also denied rumours that he was leaving Celcom to join its largest rival, Maxis Communications Bhd, saying he was committed to seeing through its transformation from the perceived “underdog” of the local mobile industry into a more aggressive brand.