In the mobile money discussion at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress 2010, Aamir Ibrahim, CMO- Telenor Pakistan highlighted the progress of easypaisa which very recently completed its first anniversary.
Ibrahim noted that easypaisa has potentially a huge market share as Pakistan was “grossly under-banked,” even compared to neighbouring countries such as India and Bangladesh.
He also shared that easypaisa accounts for 0.4 percent of Telenor Pakistan’s revenues as of today and it is targeting to take this to 10% in three years time. It also plans to at least double its number of payment products from the four services it currently offers. New easypaisa products in the pipeline include salary dispersals, ticketing, insurance, loans and leasing, Ibrahim said.
At another session discussing the unique requirements of operating in emerging markets like Asia, Sigve Brekke, head of Telenor Asia, noted that while Telenor has controlling stakes in its Asian businesses, it is not attempting to harmonise its brands, products and services across its different markets. “Our operational model is not to take out a lot of common operating platforms across many different countries. We operate under different brands, we have different types of pricing concepts and different types of services, because we think it is so important to be close to where the customer is. In every market where we operate, they are different”. The company does enable staff to transfer between businesses in order to share best practices – “we try to take our synergies through people,” he said.
Interestingly, talking about technology rollouts, Brekke also highlighted a strategy of taking small steps. “We are very careful about moving into 3G. We are operating on 3G in Malaysia, we have experience. We choose to stay out of the 3G race in India and in Pakistan, and in Bangladesh we are also operating on 2G and we have seen very promising growth in data coming from a pure 2G platform.” Thus the operator has no plans to step-up to 3G in near future.
Source Mobile Business Briefing
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