Symphonet secures RM1.359bil guarantor

KUALA LUMPUR: Although it has yet to secure financiers, Symphonet Sdn Bhd announced that it has a guarantor for US$453mil (RM1.359bil) to fund its three large projects.

Chief executive officer Datuk Baharum Salleh said the three projects an e-commerce trading platform, and two submarine fibre optic cable systems, namely the Johor-Jakarta Cable System (JJCS) and Terengganu-Vietnam Cable System (TVNCS) were financially backed by Indonesia's PT Saras TLP Investment (Saras Group).

“Saras Group will be the guarantor for all those projects. We're still negotiating to secure financing. We've not decided yet... whichever bank that can give you a good deal,” Baharum said at a briefing after a signing ceremony between Symphonet and Saras Group, PT Interkoneksi Internet Indonesia (3i) and Vietnam Hi Technology Development and Investment Joint Stock Company (VITEDI).

Baharum declined to disclose which bank would provide the financing. “We hope to secure the funds as soon as possible subject to the discussion taking place,” he added.

On the cost of the projects, he said about US$300mil would be required for the e-commerce platform, US$100mil for JJCS and US$60mil for TVNCS.

The JJCS will link Iskandar Malaysia in Johor to Jakarta, while the TVNCS is from Kertih, Terengganu, to Vung Tau in Vietnam. The e-commerce project belongs to the Saras Group and would be carried out by Symphonet.

The Indonesian group will also fund the e-commerce project, which will cover at least 480 sites in Indonesia. Baharum said the details of the investment and ownership structure of the underseas cable projects were, however, still being discussed.

Symphonet had earlier announced its joint venture (JV) with 3i on the 1,300km JJCS. Yesterday's event formalised the setting up of the JV company, Malindo Cable Network Pte Ltd. At the same time, Symphonet signed a consortium agreement with VITEDI for the 800km TVNCS.

The TVNCS is meant to serve as the Eastern international gateway into the Indochina markets, while the JJCS was positioned as the Southern gateway that would extend its customers to India, the Middle East, Europe and the United States through strategic partnerships.

When asked on the expected revenue from the projects, Baharum said all three would have recurring income, with the JJCS expected to generate the most.

Without disclosing details, he added that Symphonet and the Saras Group would be announcing four more projects in the near future, including two in Malaysia.

Source: the Star Online 24 August 2011

Symponet bags US$300m deal to set up e-commerce in Indonesia

KUALA LUMPUR: Little known company Symponet Sdn Bhd has bagged a US$300 million deal from
Indonesia's PT Saras TLP Investment Group to establish an e-commerce platform in Indonesia.
Symponet, established only three years ago, has been given the job to integrate 480 outlets across islands of
Indonesia.
Symponet managing director Datuk Baharum Salleh said that the e-commerce platform will also have two
data centres and network operations centres - one each in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur. It will also have a data
recovery centre in Malaysia.
Baharum was speaking to reporters following the signing of three documents, one of which was an
memorandum of understanding for the e-commerce platform.
The Saras Group, which is described as providing international financial services, is also acting as guarantor
for two other submarine cable projects - a 1,300km cable from Iskandar Johor Bahru to Jakarta with an
estimated cost of US$100 million and a 800km from Kerteh in Terengganu to Vung Tau in Vietnam worth
US$60 million.
Symponet is yet to secure any funding for these projects, but Baharum said it is in talks with several
institutions to see who can offer the best deal.
However, initial work on the Johor-Jakarta Cable (JJC) has commenced with the likely date for completion set
for end-2012, at the latest.
Symponet also formalised the joint venture with PT Interkoneksi Internet Indonesia called Malindo Cable
Network Pte Ltd for the JJC yesterday.
Another agreement was for the setting up of a consortium with Vietnamese broadband service provider
Vietnam Hi Technology Development and Investment Joint Stock Company (Vitedi).
The equity structure of both cable projects are yet to be determined. Baharum said that there could be as many
as four partners in each project.
The Saras Group financing instrument arrangement is to the tune of US$453 million encompassing a total of
seven projects, two of which are yet to be announced.
The group was represented by its executive chairman Arya Widjaya.
Source: Business Times 2011/08/24

England Riots: Hackers hit BlackBerry Site over Police Help

A hacker group has attacked Blackberry's website after the company said it would assist police investigating riots in the UK.

Team Poison defaced the official Blackberry blog, posting a message that threatened the firm with retaliation if it handed user data to authorities.

Blackberry's instant messaging service is believed to have been used by some looters to plan their movements.

The firm has promised to co-operate with police and the Home Office.

In its statement, Team Poison said that it did not condone innocent people or small businesses being attacked in the riots.

However, it added: "We are all for the rioters that are engaging in attacks on the police and government."

The group argued that if Blackberry gave subscriber information to police, it could lead to the wrong people being targeted.

"Innocent members of the public who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and owned a Blackberry will get charged for no reason at all," said Team Poison's statement.

It threatened to release employee information, including names, addresses and phone numbers of Blackberry staff.

UK laws mean police can request data from individuals' mobile phones when that information relates to criminal activity.

The procedure is governed by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

Partner or Perish

By Joseph Waring, Telecom Asia

"What do my customers want?" While it may seem like a simple question, it is shocking how many operators really don't have a clear picture. Traditional telcos are still focused on the technology - bringing down the cost per bit and delivering the fastest speeds. The marketing guys are mostly left out of the equation.

That's the "old" school. A roundtable of telco and media executives moderated by group editor Joseph Waring recently discussed how operators have to open up, give up some control and accept they are now the servant of the user.

The days of pushing ahead alone in segments that aren't their core competencies, such as music and entertainment, are over. The new model is partnerships, in various forms, and increasingly dealerships.

Softbank senior executive VP Ted Matsumoto said that in the past business executives were motivated by egos - they wanted to control the market by having others use their technology or products. "But today no one can do everything so it's a mixture of many people putting together components. In this new world, once you accept that the customer is the top priority, your life becomes easier. To be successful we have to get user support - no one will argue with that."

But he notes there is always the tendency for a company to want to "be the guy who sells to the users, but actually it has to be a mixture," citing the example of the winning package of iPhone hardware, Apple App Store and the operator's network and services.

When you realize you are the servant of the user, Matsumoto said it breaks down any reluctance to tie up with others. He said Softbank's exclusivity for the iPhone has given it differentiation and is the secret to its success.

Blyk co-founder Antti Ohrling pointed out the distinction between partnerships and dealerships, which need to be exclusive to have value. He said he's sure there are big players out there that will never give exclusivity because they don't need to.

"But on the other hand, operators sit on that gold dust of knowing their customers better than anybody else. By combining that intelligence from the network with Blyk's intelligence about what people say they like and don't like, it's a staggering picture you start to develop."
He said that is a level of intelligence that is not available from the over-the-top players, noting it gives operators a chance in a specific geographical area.

But having access to customer data and using it are two very different things. Nucleus Connect CEO David Storrie expressed surprise at how little some telcos know about what their users want.

"As a wholesaler, our whole business is based on partnering with the service providers. When we sit down with potential service providers, the first thing I do is ask them what they are trying to deliver to end-users, and you'd be amazed at how many blank faces there are on the other side of the table," he said.

Loo Yew Ming, Universal Music's VP for digital & business development, noted that the issue is that telcos try to work in a space that's not their core competencies. "Take music for example - a lot of operators try to sell music when the guys running those divisions know nothing about music. That's where they can definitely benefit from a partnership. Music marketing is our core competency and you guys run the network and know the customers best."

Dialogic CEO Nick Jensen said, “You’re spot on. A traditional telco is a technologist's playground - the marketers are the minority. With an MVNO the marketers are the majority because they don't care about the network infrastructure."

But partnerships come in many forms and benefit telcos differently. Ohrling explained that operators need social networks like Facebook more than they need operators. "If that is the case, they aren't paying you, you are paying them - because if you don't have them you're not as good in the marketplace as your competitor. The consumer wants that more and they don't care where they get it.

"There's this dynamic happening as well, it's not just a matter of being a partner or a dealer, but someone paying a 'market tax' which is eating up the playing field, like in the cable TV industry."

CSL CMO Mark Liversidge said it's a question of helping the end-user use Android and Apple devices for all the things they want and have a good experience on the social networks of their choice. "Our focus is how do we provide this in a packaged way that makes it easy for them to access."

CSL recently launched a social media program called Tribes, which builds social comment on Apple and Android.

The market reality, Jensen said, is that "if you have Apple, the other guy has Apple. If you have over-the-top play, the other guy has it. Everyone has Facebook and everyone will have LTE."

He said carriers are saying they don't just want to be the pass-through guy or the middleman who doesn't add value on the content side. "They want to own content because they have to compete with the guy around the corner that has the same devices, the same spectrum and the same network equipment. I can't differentiate there, so I have to differentiate on being hip and providing content the others can't."

He asks operators: "What do you want to do? Because you can't all do the same thing. If you all do the same thing, there is no differentiation and it becomes a commodity."

Jensen, explaining the benefits of blasting an announcement of say a Lady Gaga concert that is available to your video subscribers, said such a promotion drives sales of high-end handsets and generates transaction-based revenue from users who watch the concert on their handsets.

"Over time you build profiles and then you can add advertisements. That's how you make money so you don't have give it to Apple or give it to Google because you control it. You become hip because it happens on your network."

Ohrling said, from Blyk's experience, any information you gather is negative unless the subject knows you're doing it. "It's about transparency. People are willing to share an incredible amount of information if you tell them why. When you become a master of your subscribers' information, then the question of partnership or dealership becomes less important because you are the best channel to any individual in that market."

He said he found the Universal Music approach of working with mobile operators on a revenue sharing basis refreshing. "With the type of exclusive partnerships you can get much more intimate. You can build IPR that your partners can have and use."

Loo from Universal Music said that is the key driver of its partnership with SingTel. "The only way to go to a promoted concert for free is to sign up with SingTel and buy a device."

Nucleus Connect's Storrie pointed out that some offers to customers, such as LBS in-store promotions, are powerful only when they reach the majority of the market.

He gave an example of a retail chain in Singapore sending special offers to customers by SMS. "It didn't take off because they really needed to have all the operators working together so everybody in the store got the message, not just the StarHub customers."

Jensen said the challenges of the carriers are very different from market to market because of huge variations in monthly spend, the amount of fiber available and the bandwidth available.

Carriers have a choice – they can be an enabler of bandwidth and let people pass through and collect payment. "It's a great business model and will work for some markets if you're good at taking the costs down. But operators in developing markets like India and Bangladesh with low ARPU don't have that luxury - they don't even have customers that can afford to by an iPhone. Activity is transaction based."

He said the users still want a smartphone, so the operators have to think differently. Because content is king, he encourages them to have exclusive access to content, like Airtel, which owns the rights to Premier League Cricket and Manchester United content.

The operator's model is for users to make per-game or per-minute downloads and time shift to make a purchase of say a ManU jersey on the Airtel site and go back to the game.
Softbank's Matsumoto raised the point that many times business people are too impatient and try to make money very quick. "I think it's a mistake. If you sell devices capable of supporting certain services, users shouldn't have to always calculate how much they'll have to pay in total. But if they buy an expensive device and all the services are free, they will make a decision. To start with it should be free."

CSL's Liversidge said the industry needs to throw out the old model of looking at the number of connections. “It's the out old-fashioned way of looking at things. We need to shift our thinking to the context of 'we have a network, it's a sunken cost, how do I fill it?' I have to think like an airline now. If that jumbo flies half full, I can't take seats off and put them on the next one; it's wasted inventory."

He said CSL is shifting its focus to the end-user and moving away from the standard operator model of a single user, with a single device on a single plan. "This is why we've got into position where we're obsessed with the big device vendors that have been in control."
Because more consumers are carrying multiple devices, CSL has to cater to that change. "It's more important for us to build service support and delivery of content and apps to devices, which is were we see our value and where we'll take our profitability from."

He said CSL is getting out of the game of giving away devices with massive subsidies.

Extreme Trust: A Difficult Future for Telecom Companies

By Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. - telecomasia.net

Most telecom operators today consider themselves to be trustable, and by yesterday’s standards they are. They post their prices honestly, they try their best to maintain the quality and reliability of their service, and they generally do what they promise.

The e-social revolution has brought an unprecedented level of transparency into all aspects of our lives, from personal friendships to business dealings, driving everyone’s expectations higher.

As a result, many common business practices today are becoming ‘worst practices’. And even though they don’t actually lie or steal, the fact is that telecom companies still generate substantial profits simply by fooling customers, or by taking advantage of their lack of knowledge, or by capitalizing on their mistakes.

In tomorrow’s hyperconnected, hyper-transparent world, however, companies will be expected to beextremely trustable. They will be expected to proactively work to protect a customer’s own interests. It has always been the case that making a profit from a customer’s error might (if the customer eventually found out) jeopardize a firm’s relationship with that individual customer.

Tomorrow’s untrustable behavior will be much more widely publicized, arousing the righteous indignation of customers who aren’t involved, but who will take satisfaction in ‘punishing’ a firm by spreading the news of their bad deeds and withholding their own patronage. As a result, simple trustability will soon become one of the most important basic ingredients of acceptable customer service in every business category, including telecom.

In the e-social future, a company will only be able to succeed, competitively, if it enjoys the extreme trust of each customer in the same way a friend enjoys the extreme trust of another friend.

Unfortunately, telecom companies are in danger of becoming case studies in untrustable behavior. If telecom companies don’t begin changing their policies soon, in fact, they are destined to become the ‘used car salesmen’ of the future, infamous for their sneaky ways and untrustable behaviors and parodied by the next generation of entertainers and comedians.

Due to pricing complexity, rapid technological change, and the increasing diversity of services offered, today’s telecom companies are ideally positioned to make money through consumer error or lack of information, and many of them gleefully do so.

In the U.S., for instance, the New York Times recently exposed an operator for coaching its call center reps on how to avoid giving legitimate refunds to customers.

When people called in to complain about unanticipated charges for data access, reps were instructed not to inform customers about how to block these types of accidental calls unless a customer specifically asked how to do so.

It may be an extreme case, but this sort of policy epitomizes the dilemma that most telecom companies face: Proactively protecting customers from their own errors costs money, requiring a firm to be willing to sacrifice some current profits.

The sheer complexity of telecom offerings today virtually ensures that consumers will in fact make many such mistakes.

So what will a genuinely trustable telecom company really look like? What will it do differently?

For one thing, a genuinely trustable operator will automatically assign customers to the most economic calling plans based on their calling, texting and data usage. A ‘best practice’ will
be to retroactively assign the most economic calling plan for each customer, crediting the customer with a rebate where appropriate.

Very few operators today do this, of course, and those that do often use it as an excuse to extend a postpaid contract.

If a customer is about to subscribe to a mobile or landline service from a home or business address that is prone to poor network coverage or slow broadband connectivity, a genuinely trustable telecom company will advise them in advance of this weakness in their offering, perhaps providing a discount or other benefit until such time as service in their home area is improved.

A genuinely trustable telecom operator will almost certainly have an unconditional money-back guarantee available to cover any and all customer complaints. In the same way today’s best online merchants offer unconditional refunds, tomorrow’s operators will use such a
policy to ensure that customers always receive the service they expect.

Trustable behavior like this is very difficult for any company to embrace, because it flies directly in the face of most firms’ deepest instincts to ‘keep the cash’ and maximize their short-term profits.

Acting in the customer’s interest requires a firm to be willing to forego immediate profits in return for earning the longer-term respect and confidence of its customers.

As telecom companies must become more trustable, because the rising power of customers exposes untrustable behavior, the question of a company’s trustability will go to the heart of its value proposition. Trustability will become an essential element of any company’s customer service in the future in much the same way that having a website has become an essential element of customer service.

To survive in this new, hyper-transparent world in which extreme trust is a prerequisite for business success, a telecom operator must pursue four basic courses of action:

Reciprocity. Having empathy for customers, and treating each one the way you yourself would want to be treated if you were that customer, is the single most important element of trustability. To be trustable, you have to adopt a customer-centric philosophy, and then re-engineer your value proposition and customer experience from the standpoint of the customer.

This will have consequences for your operating policies, of course, but the eventual implications for your firm’s culture will be even more profound. The reason the operator’s underhanded antirefund policies were exposed in the New York Times in the first place is that an employee contacted a reporter. In the end, your telecom employees are customers, too, and if your own workers don’t believe you are a trustable company, then your customers won’t either.

Giving up some control. To make your command-andcontrol, hierarchical firm more trustable you will have to give more authority to individual employees. You need resilience, but well-controlled hierarchies can be rigid and brittle. Think about how to decentralize.

Empower employees to ‘sense and respond’, in real time, to customer issues. This is yet another reason to pay close attention to the culture at your firm, and the unwritten rules that govern how employees really get things done.

While you’re at it, you should also recognize that things will never be perfect, so be prepared in advance for the mistakes. Even if your policies are extremely trustable you’re still going to get ambushed occasionally by rogue customer comments.

Don’t be too afraid to allow your workers to show your company’s human side, including its vulnerability. Brand statements and press releases are perfect, but vulnerability will encourage customers to be empathetic to you, and empathy generates trust.

Community. One of the secrets behind the e-social revolution is that people have an irresistible urge to share with others. They make their opinions known, they contribute ideas, they collaborate on things such as Wikipedia and open source software, and many companies even find that customers provide the best kind of customer service for other customers.

If you want to become more trustable you have to tap this sharing instinct, first by sharing your own honest counsel with customers. Talk to them not just in terms of how they can get more value from their service, but how they can better connect with friends, how they can find things out faster, manage their connections more efficiently, and live their own lives more fully.

It’s ironic that telecom play such a vital role in connecting people and releasing their sharing impulses, but service providers themselves don’t have much to say on the subject.

Competence. There are two requirements for being trustable. Not only must your intent be to act in the customer’s interest (reciprocity), but you have to have the competence to act on that intent, as well. On a basic level this means paying close attention to the quality of your product and service. But just as important, you should upgrade your data, analytics, and systems.

Quantifying the financial benefits of long-term customer trust and confidence requires good analytics. Customer lifetime values are not easy to compute, but in the communications industry, more than in most other categories, the statistical data is clearly available and there is no shortage of analytical tools to make these calculations. If you want your telecom company to become more trustable, you’ll have to begin paying attention to the data and pushing the envelope on analysis.

What kinds of events tend to move customer lifetime values higher or lower? What customer interactions, or ‘moments of truth’, are more likely to drive perceptions of trustability? And which of your customers are more trustable (and valuable) themselves?

The bottom line: in a world of extreme trust you always have to take a step back from whatever business policy you’re considering, whatever new idea you’re thinking about, and ask yourself: “If this became public, would it be an embarrassment to us? Would we be proud of it? Would some of our customers hold it against us?” There’s a very good chance that whatever you do will become public. If you want your telecoms company to be genuinely trustable, then you have to have clean hands, not just a good alibi.

Shaping the Future of Telecom

It’s no secret that telcos can’t go about doing business as usual anymore. It’s been over 25 years since AT&T was broken up and competition came onto the scene, but today the traditional telcos are still having a rough time of it.

The future may be challenging for operators, but we offer some solutions. In an article from our flagship publication, Perspectives, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers point to four basic courses of action for telecom operators: reciprocity, giving up some control, community and competence. And in a roundtable discussion with industry executives, Telecom Asia editor Joseph Waring finds out that operators need to open up, give up some control and move toward a new business model of partnerships in order to survive.

The Hidden Value of Social-Networking Data

More and more businesses are using social networking to keep in contact with their customers and to track how their products are performing. Yet social networking can offer much more (in the form of analytics) to businesses that know what to look for.

Posts and conversations on social-networking sites are turning into the latest form of big data, with large amounts of data being stored and available for analysis. That allows businesses to apply the same tools used for big data analytics to social networking.

Social-networking sites are ripe targets for companies to gain new business intelligence.

Many vendors are coming on the scene to offer analytical technology for this market. The idea behind these technologies is to identify customer sentiment toward a particular brand or product, which a business can then translate into marketing fodder.

A good example of this comes in the form of what Wall Street is attempting to do with social media and social-networking services. In a quest to gain a competitive edge, Wall Street traders and brokers are using socially aware big data analytics tools to monitor conversations, tweets and posts to social-networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Analytical tools that sort through this massive amount of data are using complex algorithms to monitor and decode the words, opinions, rants, and even keyboard-generated smiley faces posted on social-media sites. Wall Street is regaining insights into the mindset of consumers and the general feelings toward the market, the economy and the political environment. What’s more, that analysis can determine the communal mindset of consumers and their general feelings toward the market—the biggest element being consumer confidence.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss some of the new solutions that are available to perform the needed analytics on social-networking sites.

(Source: Frank Ohlhorst - smartertechnology.com July 25, 2011)