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Wataniya network to cover central Iraq soon
May 30, 2005
Kuwait City,
Kuwait's Wataniya Telecom will soon finish rolling out a mobile phone service in central Iraq as its expands in the country despite a violent insurgency, the company's chief executive said.
Harri Koponen, the new Finnish general manager and CEO of Wataniya Telecom, said Baghdad and the main population centres in the central region will be covered by its consortium's network, adding to a grid already built in northern Iraq.
"Now we are building the network in central Iraq. It will be announced ... soon," Koponen told said in an interview.
"We will have coverage of the whole central region, the most important parts, not everything of course because Iraq is quite a big country. But the main populated centres will be covered."
MTC, Kuwait's largest telecommunications firm, has built a mobile phone network in southern Iraq and is also expanding into the centre of the country.
Wataniya won a licence in 2003 to develop a network in the north of Iraq, but has gradually extended its coverage into the central region. The original licence for central Iraq was granted to Orascom Telecom of Egypt, while MTC won the southern licence.
Wataniya, known also as National Mobile Telecommunications Company, currently boasts 3.5 million subscribers across the Middle East and North Africa, Koponen said, up from 2.7 million at the end of last year.
Of those, it has well over 800,000 users in Kuwait, a country of 2.7 million people covered also by bigger rival MTC or Mobile Telecom Company, he added. Wataniya is planning to establish a service in the Maldives soon.
Koponen said the Iraq user base was still relatively small, making it hard to talk about the penetration rate there.
"It's in its infancy," Koponen said.
"But lraq is one of the biggest potential markets, and it just needs to calm down, to get it safer for the engineers to build the stuff," he added.
"We have been enjoying perhaps the best regions, because we came from the north ... which has been safe. Now we are moving into the more active part, the Baghdad area, and it takes caution -- we don't want to end up in a situation where our engineers are getting killed."
Koponen said the Tunisian and Algerian markets were growing despite a tough price war with entrenched players in Algeria.
"The market penetration in both of those countries are showing very, very good signs," Koponen said. The market penetration rate has doubled to over 14 per cent in Algeria from 7 per cent when Wataniya entered that market, he added.
In Kuwait, Wataniya is betting on a strategy of superior service, to boost its customer base in a heavily saturated market with a penetration rate of over 80 per cent.
Yesterday, Finnish telecom equipment maker Nokia signed a contract worth 100 million euros ($125.7 million) to upgrade Wataniya's network, following a similar upgrade finished earlier this year by Sweden's Ericsson.
Wataniya said the Nokia deal opened the way to "beyond 3G" as the network will support technology which allows for broadband Internet access at speeds of up to 2 megabits per second, as opposed to much slower dial-up speeds.
"This is truly the way telecoms should be doing business, we think," Koponen said. "This will give us the benefit and flexibility to develop very advanced services, very simple and very customised services."
Asked how 2005 was shaping up financially for Wataniya, which in April reported first-quarter net profit rose 11 percent to $41.6 million, Koponen said: "It is looking quite positive."
Shares in Wataniya ended flat at 1.760 on the Kuwaiti stock market where the main index fell 47.50 points, or 0.58 per cent, to 8,178.30. Wataniya's shares have reached a 52-week low and high of KD1.580 and KD2.060, respectively.
Source: Trade Arabia
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