Asia's largest mobile venture takes shape

Bharti, 6 others to invest $30-40mn in 3 years.

Seven major Asia-Pacific mobile phone service operators, including Bharti Tele-Ventures "" having 56 million subscribers between them "" today formed a joint venture that will invest $30-40 million over the next three years in regional mobile telephony.

Apart from Bharti, the other six are Global Telecom (Philippines), Maxis (Malaysia), Optus (Australia), SingTel (Singapore), Taiwan Cellular Corporation, and Telkomsel (Indonesia).

The joint venture will be called the Bridge Mobile Alliance, equally owned by the seven companies, and will operate from Singapore. A statement from the alliance said it would be the largest mobile joint venture in the Asia-Pacific when it became operational by the first quarter of 2005.

Other mobile operators as well as strategic partners such as technology and applications vendors will be offered membership in the alliance.

Bridge Mobile's working group chairman is SingTel's CEO, Lim Chuan Poh. He explained the need for such an alliance: "The region has highly diversified cultures, economies, mobile market maturity and varying degrees of technological development. As a result, mobile operators in the region are unable to fully capitalise on economies of scale."

Poh added that cross-border connections beyond voice remained poor, and different technical standards could lead to further market fragmentation.

So what does it mean for Bharti's subscribers? Manoj Kohli, president (mobility), Bharti Tele-Ventures, told Business Standard: "Our mobile base of 9 million will avail of benefits like seamless roaming, the ability to dial the same short code to access customers and voicemail services and topping of prepaid accounts to any counter belonging to the alliance operators," said Kohli.

Kohli said the equity would be utilised for launching products on a common platform and to address business process outsourcing operations.

Kohli added it was a select club: only those operators that dominate businesses in their respective countries will be included.

A CEO conclave of the alliance will be held in Goa during November 23-25.