The country’s largest telecommunication service provider Nepal Telecom (NT) said on Monday that it would be putting greater focus on the data segment in a bid to strengthen its penetration in the domestic market.
The data segment is the fastest rising sector in the country’s telecom market, but NT has not been able to tap into this shift, as per recent data.
According to government records, NT is still numero uno in the data and voice segments. However, it lags behind in terms of growth rate. NT held a 56.26 percent share of the market in the data segment in fiscal 2014-15. The figure dropped to 55.15 percent in fiscal 2015-16.
Though the decline in terms of percentage points is minimal, it indicates that NT has not been able to achieve a growth momentum in the data segment despite having a larger subscriber base.
The MIS (Management Information System) data published by the Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) shows that the data segment swelled 18.17 percent in December 2016 from the same period in the previous year.
Last year, the growth rate of the data segment surpassed that of the voice segment, pointing to a major shift in expansion trends in Nepal’s telecommunications sector.
Ncell, the other major player in the country’s telecom scene, witnessed a 22.28 percent growth in the number of data service subscribers between December 2015 and December 2016.
Ncell had 4.92 million data subscribers as of mid-December 2015. By the end of 2016, the figure had risen to 6.01 million.
However, state-owned telecom service provider NT, with 7.67 million subscribers, witnessed a growth in the data segment of just 15.14 percent during the same one-year period.
“As a leading player, we understand the market trend and are putting all our efforts into increasing the penetration in the data segment,” said Kamini Rajbhandari, managing director of NT. “Our aim is to focus on quality rather than the number of subscribers.”
NT expects its recently launched 4G service to propel growth in the data market. The state-owned company had opened 4G service as a pilot phase in Kathmandu and Pokhara in the beginning of January.
According to NT joint spokesperson Prativa Vaidya, NT has mounted an aggressive marketing effort by unveiling varied schemes and data plans to cement its position as the market leader in the data segment.
Source: http://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/news/2017-03-21/nt-acts-to-maintain-supremacy-in-data.html