Poor Is The Future

• Telecoms

The poor is the market for the telecoms industry, a former regulator said.
Professor Rohan Samarajiva, former Director General of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (T.R.C.) speaking at a seminar in Colombo on Tuesday said that a good example of this was Hutch, which targeted that market and achieved an E.B.I.T.D.A. of 52%, before the Government’s distorted tax policy on the telecoms industry ruined that ratio.
How be it the telecoms industry is still making good money, Samarajiva who is currently the Executive Director of LIRNEAsia, a think tank, which has a bent on using I.C.T. for the uplift of the poor said.
The seminar was organized by Intec, a global billing solutions provider.
Samarajiva further said that one of their samples was a 19 year old mason’s help from Piliyandala, who, when he had work, used to make Rs. 700 a day.
He cannot live without his mobile phone, said Samarajiva. The mobile phone is not just for voice, this labourer by using “blue tooth” also listens to music.
Growing in upward mobility as far as using the latest mobile phone available in the market was concerned, this man has changed the number of mobile phones he has been using, which are almost equivalent to his age, by selling off the previous and buying the latest.
A woman who was also captured in this survey had said that if she loses her hand phone, it would be similar to the loss she would feel in the case of a family bereavement.
Samarajiva further said that a champion of lower call charges in the local telecoms industry was C.E.O. Etisalat, Dumindra Ratnayaka.
He also said that the pre-paid market, the market of the poor, which is more cost efficient than the post paid market which has more frills and trappings such as paper bills and customer care, is the market of the future.
It’s like the budget airlines which are making more money than the traditional airlines, said Samarajiva. A representative from Lanka Bell speaking at this seminar said that they were able to increase their customer base from 40,000 to 1.2 million by going rural.