Norway’s Telenor has ruled out heavily investing in Myanmar towers as part of a “capex light model” that will focus on sharing and outsourcing as much as possible.
The company has so far taken on two local towercos to help it launch services in…
Norway’s Telenor has ruled out heavily investing in Myanmar towers as part of a “capex light model” that will focus on sharing and outsourcing as much as possible.
The company has so far taken on two local towercos to help it launch services in eight months: Apollo and a joint venture between Viom and Golden.
Jon Fredrik Baksaas, Telenor’s CEO, said in an analysts call: “Of course we will probably also own some towers ourselves, but the big majority of this will be a joint effort.”
By outsourcing towers, IT, managed services and call centre operations, the telco believes peak funding will reach around US$1bn, which is significantly less than some analysts had expected.
The approach is similar to rival mobile licence winner Ooredoo of Qatar and, with Myanmar planning another spectrum auction in a few months that could add another player to a market that state-owned MPT is still present in, Telenor hopes it will be able to avoid building multiple towers next to each other as has been the case elsewhere in Asia.
The company also expects to break-even in EBITDA in three years, however, it cautioned that the country still poses many risks to its plans. Not least of these are the land ownership issues that could block the deployment of base stations. In addition, only a quarter of the country’s population has access to electricity, which is a problem Telenor said it will also be outsourcing to its tower partners.
