News: Digicel boss upbeat on T&T

(TTG 12/04/2006) Port of Spain - A mobile phone for $49 had customers in droves at the Digicel stores yesterday. And customers can expect to get more, as the company announced the promotion was the first in its marketing strategy to capture a greater share of the local mobile market.

Denis O’Brien, Digicel’s Irish chairman, said last Thursday’s opening was a soft launch as the company was just testing the market.

But the response has exceeded Digicel’s expectations by about 50 per cent, he said at a press conference at Digicel’s head office at Ansa Centre, Maraval Road.

“This is a long game and it’s going to be very competitive. We said we’d take four or five days and see how it goes and now we’re fully on. They (TSTT) are going to try to stop us from gaining customers and they will have initiatives and we will come back with initiatives,” he said.

“From our point of view, we’ve reduced handset prices to rock bottom prices so people can enjoy our networks. But once they go on the network the experience is completely different. Down the line there will be a whole number of different products and services we’ll be rolling out,” promised O’Brien.

He said TSTT had tried to bury the competition instead of fixing the issues with their own network.

“There is so much misinformation coming out of TSTT. For example, when they advertise, they don’t put in VAT (value added tax)—we put in VAT. But they are stripping out VAT to compare prices. It’s no point in us going there,” he said.

“For so long, the people of this country have paid rip-off prices for cellular phones, for fixed line services, and that day has now come to an end,” he said.

But O’Brien remained unphased by what he called “panic” marketing by TSTT to maintain its stronghold on the local market.

He said a similar strategy was employed by Cable and Wireless in Jamaica prior to Digicel’s launch in 2001, but it did not stop Digicel from capturing more than 70 per cent of the market.

O’Brien advised that TSTT should be more focused on securing its fixed market customer base as liberalisation often spelt the death of that business.

“We think out of 1.2-1.3 million population, mobile penetration can go to 1.1 million people. So that is 85-90 per cent of the population of the country. And we’ve seen that in other markets fixed lines dropping dramatically. Now that is bad news for our competitor but that is great news for us. We think that people want to be in the mobile world,” he said.