SingTel
deal good for two out of three
South China Morning Post. January 26, 2000
OP-ED: JAKE VAN DER KAMP
LET'S have a little of the flavour of Singapore Telecom now that we are looking at the prospect of the Singapore government becoming the largest shareholder in our biggest telecommunications operator.
Back last month a nasty little spat broke out between SingTel and Anttel, a callback operator that serves foreign workers in Singapore by selling them phone cards which they can use to call home at discounted rates through a line Anttel leases from SingTel.
It transpires that SingTel had bought up to S$40,000 worth of Anttel's cards to make continuous calls to weather stations in Los Angeles and Tokyo at peak hours, thus clogging Anttel's leased line and forcing it to put the overflow through SingTel's regular lines at much higher charges than it got from the phone cards.
Asked about this, a SingTel spokesman said: "It is quite a common practice to check how good an alternative operator's service is."
Let us be grateful, however, that SingTel will no longer be induced to engage in such childish capers to wring money out of foreign workers.
Callback operators in Singapore now have permission to advertise and become licensed services in April.
This, according to a bulletin that circulates in Singapore, the PAP Rendition and Authorised Version of Daily Announcements (Pravda), will allow them to compete with the big operators as they do in Hong Kong where IDD rates are significantly lower.
Well, yes, our rates are indeed much lower but did you people in Singapore know that we have already long passed the callback operator stage? Call back only really works in heavily restricted markets. Yours is. Ours isn't.
Then we had that other incident last year where SingTel became worried about a computer virus that may have come in through the Internet. It called in the police, gave them the passwords to all its Internet subscribers and, hello Big Brother, who was that monkeying with my files last night?
But soothe yourselves. Pravda again reported only last year that, despite there being only one basic telecoms operator in the market, "Singapore has emerged as Asia-Pacific's most competitive telecommunications hub for the second time running, thanks to its attractive pricing packages."
Ahem. Okay. It was actually the National University of Singapore that awarded this accolade. Have you got a problem with that?
This "most competitive" status of course must have been the reason that the Singapore authorities suddenly decided last week to open their telecommunications market wide to foreigners and bring forward the deadline for full competition by two years to April 1.
Surely they could not have done it because they realised that we in Hong Kong with our open market have gone racing ahead of them in this business. How could that possibly be the case when Singapore is Asia-Pacific's most competitive telecommunications hub?
Let's also put a stop to any possible gossip about how the announcement of an impending open market gave SingTel such a case of the jitters that it went running in fright to Cable & Wireless with a plea that it be allowed to merge with C&W HKT (our biggest operator's latest mouthful of a name change).
Merging with others as a defensive move might be the reaction in a protected market of an operator with doubts about its own efficiency and competitiveness but Singapore, let us remember, is Asia-Pacific's most competitive . . .
This proposed merger is probably a good deal for Cable & Wireless which, having lost its Hong Kong cash cow when its Hong Kong monopoly was broken, is now seeking to recreate itself. It is probably also a good deal for SingTel.
But C&W HKT faces the prospect of exposure to a Singapore market that has suddenly turned into a free-for-all with none of the required work on interconnect fees and a regulatory framework yet done.
Contrary to what people in Singapore may think, Hong Kong's market is open but it is not a free-for-all.
Opening up requires the evolution of a new regulatory framework, a particularly difficult transition for a country with an all-pervasive tradition of government-directed economic effort.
E-mail Jake van der Kamp at jakeva@scmp.com