... In the meanwhile, Dato Izzadin Idris has resigned as President and CEO of Axiata Group with immediate effect yesterday. Celcom Axiata together with Digi, Maxis and U Mobile wants a 51% stake in DNB. The telcos agreeable to DNB are YTL and Telekom.
Apparently, Khazanah owned telcos have diverging view on DNB. Will Izzadin's departure open up Celcom to the possibility of supporting Government's 5G effort?
Edge here reported Ralph Marshall below:
“Basically if you don’t come in, we just have to open up the market,” Marshall said last week at his office in Kuala Lumpur. “The principle is accelerating the deployment and adoption of 5G in the national interest.”
Izzadin's resignation certainly raised a question. It is not so much the joint temporary CEOs are not Malaysians as the vernacular social media are concern off.
There was a rekindled merger planned between Axiata and Celcom with Digi, which failed in 2019. Nuclearbursaman highlighted that Tune Talk had taken Celcom Axiata to court to stop any the transfer of Celcom Axiata's 35% stake to the merged entity with Digi.
During the administration of Pak Lah, around 2009, Tune Talk started to build itself into the largest mobile pre-paid MCNO service provider.
The political clout enabled them to carve out part of the bandwith belonging to Celcom after Tajuddin was force to sell Celcom. Tune Talk offered cheaper IDD calls and it could mean Celcom was forced to sacrifice their profit for Tune Talk to hitch a ride.
If Celcom and Digi merged and the stake is transferred to the merged entity, it will get complicated for Tune Talk. No more money churner for Kalimullah Hassan, Lim Kian Onn, Jason Lo, Tony Fernandes, and Kamarudin Meranun. The negotiator then was Lim Kian Onn of ECM Libra fame.
One could speculate that the political funding for Khairy Jamaluddin's future onslaught for national leadership will be curtailed. So the golden shares at the disposal of the UKEC gang decided Izzaddin is in the way.
On the other hand, the path taken by Celcom Axiata is puzzling. MVNO is contributing less than one percent of profit and down the road it will contribute close to 50%. When the MVNO are doing well, Celcom has a clause to buy all the MVNO clients.
Celcom will come out the big winner by joining up in DNB, in which Kalimullah is himself promoting. Yet Celcom is resisting together with Maxis, and U Mobile. Vincent Tan has directed U Mobile to bring down their 5G is coming webpage.
If Raja Petra care to do so, he could add Tune Talk in the list of Kalimullah's wrongdoings in which he was described as worse than satan during Pak Lah's time.
Extract from: Building the nation only to be robbed: The telco experience
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