Wateen Telecom has signed an agreement with the United Services Fund (USF) to lay over 1,100 kilometre of an optical fibre network in northern Balochistan, connecting twenty un-served cities and towns in the province to ensure power of high speed broadband to influence lives and affect change.
Wateen has designed a 3-year roadmap to fill network gap in the country while it is currently focusing on high touched services like enterprises and customers for achieving excellence, sustainable growth through innovation, value addition and improving services, said Wateen Telecom's Chief Executive Officer Naeem Zamindar in an exclusive interview with Business Recorder.
The Wateen Telecom's vision is to lead Pakistan into the digital revolution of the 21st century and to make Pakistan a regional communications hub, connecting the East with the West and Central Asia with the Middle East. He said the telecom sector has registered persistent growth up to 2009 but afterward it could not sustain due to recessionary impact in all over the world. As a result, the telecom companies' investment in this sector came to halt he said and added that the government should provide necessary infrastructure for enhancing connectivity, as fast communication has become an essential tool to achieve prosperity and growth in the country.
Talking about the measures taken to get rid of financial problems, Naeem Zamindar said the company's management also opted downsizing and reduced employment by 20 percent besides cutting cost that would help improve the company's financial health. He further said Wateen Telecom is a converged communication services provider that fulfils the connectivity requirements for organisations and individuals in Pakistan. Wateen Telecom delivers complete solutions for internet, vice, multimedia and enterprise solutions. Wateen offers complete WiMAX coverage to its customers in over 23 cities around Pakistan, as well as wire-line internet services and cable TV entertainment, he added.
Briefing about the company's profile, Naeem Zamindar said the Wateen Telecom started its operations in Pakistan in 2007 with the deployment of the largest fibre optic network in the country. Moreover, Wateen is the world's first company to commercially roll out a WiMAX network on the nation-wide scale. Wateen currently services over 250,000 WiMAX subscribers, provides enterprise salutations and data services to over 200 leading organisations and its cable network reaches over 125,000 households in Lahore and Multan, he said.
With a new strategic vision and management in place, Wateen has steadily improved its service provision and its corporate structure to adequately reflect its corporate motto and beliefs of Enabling Customer Lifestyles. Wateen is aiming to help shape the education, social and economic development in the country using broad based internet provision, he added. Wateen Telecom CEO said the regulatory procedures in Pakistan have ensured level playing field with competition in the market. The entry to market is very friendly for foreign investors for the Abu Dhabi Group. Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) and the government are working to ensure access to nation-wide service availability. All of public sector departments are now online, allowing people to connect to these departments for their every-day problems.
Talking about the telecom sector, Naeem Zamindar said the industry is still in its infant phase with only 1.4m connections. People opt for connections based on either fixed line or wireless connectivity with preference for the latter. It is evident from the PTA website that wireless connections now outnumber fixed line connection whereas Wateen holds around 20 percent of the market share. However, the biggest failure that we have seen in the industry has been that operators are only pushing speed and price as the biggest drivers for the consumers.
Both of these in the longer run tend to hurt the margins for any business as we have seen in the GSM industry. Secondly, most consumers use the internet for watching videos, social media sites and playing games. He said the most important tool for growing business in our line is customer education and awareness of the different technologies and how one can really benefit from them to make Pakistan into a more dynamic, prosperous and progressive society that is geared up to meet the needs of a modern and challenging economy. At the beginning, we had some problems with the technology, as our network had only a single-wall coverage, which is why consumers would complain that it runs in one part of the house and not the other.
Similarly, since most of these problems were unique for us, it affected our service delivery, hence creating a negative perception in the market. This meant that there was a loss of opportunity for the business to capitalise on, he said. Now we are improving our services in the areas where there is high-demand. We are moving our sites from areas where there were hardly any consumers to major cities with high demand, especially the metro's which currently has around 75 percent of the users, he added.
Naeem Zamindar further said that the larger broadband market still remains untapped and we are expecting collaborations in the ICT sector that would encourage development of new best practices, which in turn would help improve the market. The biggest form of media consumption, the mobile handset, will probably be given the most importance, which is why the question of 3G is currently doing rounds in the telecom industry. The development of local content and applications is going to grow in the times to come, he hoped.
Naeem Zamindar hoped that Wateen would help make Pakistan hub for regional communication and to bring services and mechanism for data transfer. This vision reflected in the company's recent US $7.9 million deal with Afghanistan's Roshan Telecom, under the agreement, Wateen will provide Roshan with VAST services in Afghanistan for the next two years, he said.