The new service “Easy Fill” makes its subscribers easier to choose any amount they would like to top up from 50 cents up to $500. And this service is limited to only 11 provinces at present.

Beeline subscribers are able to receive service “Easy Fill” from Beeline sales offices located in 11 provinces: Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Sihanoukville, Battambang, Kampong Cham, Kandal, Kampot, Prey Veng, Kampong Chhnang, Kompong Thom and Banteay Mean Chey.

After launch in May 2010, the Beeline distribution network in Cambodia was already comprised of 11 sales offices, more than 6,400 scratch card points of sales and more than 100 branded trade countries across 21 provinces.

Therefore, Beeline subscribers have two options to top up their credit either scratch card or a new mobile service “Easy Fill”. By the way, mobile top-up service of “Easy Fill” is more convenient because customers only have to say what amount they want to top up and denominations start as low as 50 cents.

Conflict between two phone operators has yet to be solved and Beeline is still the subject of a $2.5 million suit currently before Phnom Penh Municipal Court- $1.5million in damages and $1million compensation to Mobitel.

Beeline’s General Director- Gael Campan, said that the relation between the two phone operators were back to normal after Mobitel filed a lawsuit against Beeline last year.

The loan covers the Royal Group’s November purchase of Luxembourg-based Millicom International Cellular SA’s network operations in the Kingdom for $346 million. The acquisitions included a 58.4 percent holding in Mobitel, Royal Telecom International Co Ltd and Cambodia Broadcasting Service Co Ltd.

The debt-leveraged deal is thought to have given the Royal Group 100 percent ownership of Mobitel in an agreement lead-arranged by ANZ bank.

The loan also refinances debt, including a $100 million loan arranged by International Finance Corporation in 2008.

Royal Group Chief Financial Officer Mark Hanna said Thursday that the loan sell down was “standard procedure” in the acquisition, “the biggest of its kind ever done in the region”.

Highlighting the fact that a Cambodian group was able to buy out a majority stake from a major international company, Hanna said: “It really increases the exposure that Cambodia gets.”

He added that the assets bought from Millicom form “a central part” of the Royal Group’s plans for the future.

A spokeswoman for ANZ, which is book-running and arranging the sell down together with Standard Bank, said via email from Singapore Thursday that the loan was put out for syndication on Monday.

Responses are due in the last week of April this year, she said. Lenders have been invited to join at five ticket levels, Reuters reported Thursday, paying interest of as much as 14.73 percent.

“According to Thomson Reuters LPC data, only eight syndicated loans have been completed in Cambodia, and this facility is the country’s biggest-ever corporate deal,” the ANZ spokeswoman added.

The Royal Group partnered global telecoms company Millicom for a total of 14 years.

After a strategic review of its South-East Asia assets, Millicom decided to sell its holding to its joint partner. On announcing the then prospective deal last August, Mikael Grahne, CEO of Millicom, said in a press release: “We are very proud of having played an important role in the development of the leading mobile operator in Cambodia and are very confident of the continued success of Mobitel and its people within the Royal Group.”

Millicom also approved the sale of its Laotian operations to Russia’s JSC Vimpel-Communications (VimpelCom) for $65 million. Moscow-based Vimpelcom is the parent company of Beeline, the newest entrant to Cambodia’s crowded market for mobile-phone service. It announced last week that it had garnered more than 370,000 active subscribers in the Kingdom since its launch last May.

Last week, Huawei Technologies, China’s largest private hi-tech enterprise, signed a $200 million cooperation agreement with Mobitel to extend its network.

Source: The Phnom Penh Post

By Sunday, all nine mobile phone companies had raised their per-minute rates to meet a standard cost mandated by the ministries of Finance and of Telecommunications, which they said was necessary to prevent a price war.

Costs for Cambodian consumers is now $0.05 to $0.06 per minute, a jump from some of the promotional offers of newer phone companies, some as low as nothing.

Analysts say the ministerial directive is contrary to the investment law and the policies of a free economy, but they are not willing to push further to learn how it might impact consumers and the market.

“If you speak against something, you will be considered as an attacker from an opposition party,” said Chan Sophal, head of the Cambodian Economic Association, an organization of 60 economists. “The bad environment makes these intellectuals not brave enough express themselves.”

Some 500 Cambodian economists can be find working at government institutions, in civil society and for international finance agencies. But few ever seek to intervene in government economic policies, unlike economists in neighboring countries like Thailand and Vietnam.

Chan Sophal said the government is not open to comments on its economic policies. The telecom price floor, for example, was implemented silently, and only by ministry officials, without public debate, he said.

“As independent economists, we want to provice recommendations,” said Chheng Kimlong, an economics professor at the University of Cambodia. “But we can only talk and our suggestions will not be considered.”

“Especially, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications was known to be careless of other suggestions, but they will issue any directive without accepting any recommendations,” he said.

Government officials reject such accusations.

Telecom Minister So Khun said his ministry had consulted with “many” experts before issuing the directive, though he would not elaborate or name them.

“We welcome all [suggestions], but we can’t answer whether the suggestions can be considered positive or negative,” he said. “My team will check and tell them what to do.”

Thun Saray, president of the rights group Adhoc, said the government remains prickly in the face of criticism from independent organizations—a disservice to economic development.

Ros Khemara, another member with the Cambodian Economic Association, said that in order to be professional, economists should make sure they extensively research. This is hard to do, he said, if they know their results will be ignored by the government.

Business lawyers, too, can find the environment challenging, said Ly Tay Seng, president of HBS Law Firm and Consultants.

“There are not many lawyers who want to express their opinion against the government, because they are worried it will impact their business,” he said.

Source: VOA Khmer

Gary Foo, Hello’s Brand Manager, was quoted by the Post as saying that “we’ve seen encouraging take up of our Blackberry in the past couple of months and we would like to continue to capitalize on this trend.”

He added that the Cambodian smartphone market was expanding as mobile users in the Kingdom increasing take up more sophisticated handsets.

Following launching Blackberry at the end of April, 2009, Phone operator launched the first 3G Bold handset in the July.

InSTEDD’s mission is to harness the power of technology to improve the collaboration for the global health and humanitarian action. The organization was originally funded by leading search engine Google and works internationally, with its largest projects currently in Southeast Asia, a hotbed for disease outbreaks that can spread worldwide.

This is the first time in Cambodia a deployment of this kind has happened and sets a precedent for how local communication providers can partner to bring to scale successful mobile solutions with a social impact and with a view to long-term sustainability. Along with Smart Mobile, InSTEDD looks to bring the best of technology to those who help to make local communities stronger, safer, and healthier.

Nguyen Duy Tho was quoted by the Post as saying that “currently, we are testing 3G to prepare for an official launching of this service in 2010.”

Nguyen Duy Tho gave Viettel’s ambitious targets for Cambodia in the longer term. The Vietnamese operator is aiming to capture 40 percent of the overall mobile market, 80 percent of the broadband Internet market and 80 percent of the telecoms landline market, the paper continued.

Dilyara Borovik, a counselor at the Russian Embassy, gave a speech at the an event to mark the 30^th anniversary of the Russian Cultural Center in Phnom Penh that the trade between the two countries for the first nine months of this year totaled US$32.3 million, a 28.7 percent increase over the same period last year, quoted by the Cambodia Daily as saying.

Ms. Borovik added that Cambodian exports to Russia make up 60 percent of trade between the two countries, with garments, agricultural products and seafood being the largest exported products.

In 2008, investment totaled US$600 million with businesses such as the Beeline mobile phone, said she.

“With the economic crisis this year, people are afraid to invest abroad especially if we don’t know the situation in our own country,” Ms. Borovik said.

So far, there are 9 mobile service providers operating in the Kingdom of Cambodia with some newer entrants to Cambodia’s telecoms market. The increasingly competitive phone market remain tight-tipped about the pricing rules which was set a minimum traffic charge for calls within network and calls across networks.

Leading phone service operator MobiTel and Russian Phone Company, Beeline accused each other of selling below cost price and blocking interconnectivity in September.

Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, So Khun, said that the government will suspend the license of any phone operators that violate the minimum tariff set by the edit, adding that “we offered free-market principles, but operators kept having feuds with one another, so the government needs to intervene it.”

Without the directive “violators will exploit the other companies with their prices,” said So Khun.

Simon Perkins, chief executive officer of Hello, one of the top four operators by users and an early entrant to the sector, has long been a supporter of minimum pricing and said that stability in the sector will enable operators to return to investing in network expansion and quality improvements, The Phnom Penh Post quoted as saying.

Sources within Mobitel, Hello and Metfone say new competitors have been unfairly benefiting from the infrastructure investments made by older operators, and have been able to offer cheaper services due to lower maintenance fees and equipment costs, reported the Post.

The Cambodia Daily quoted said Simon Perkins as saying that this is a measure that MPTC has had to do because there are no competition laws.” Hello, unlike several other competitors, doesn’t offer free call promotions. He said that Hello could benefit from the directive as some companies raise their prices but that this will depend on the enforcement of the law.

Following the pricing war between phone operators, the government analyzed the cost and profit information submitted by nine mobile phone firms.

Metfone Managing Director Nguyen Duy Tho was quoted by the Post as saying that the Vietnam-backed service provider, which is competing with market leader Mobitel for top spot among the Kingdom’s operators, was unfazed by the new rules.

In September, Beeline accused leading phone operator, MobiTel, of blocking calls from its network to MobiTel’s customers, and in turn MobiTel accused Beeline of charging calling price below &0.06 for between-network calls.

Prime Minister Hun Send issued a letter by warning mobile phone service providers that they could face the loss of their operating license if they still continue to block between-network calls and to give below cost calls to their customers.

The Cambodia Daily quoted Simon Perkins, CEO of Hello network as saying that his company had receive a copy of the directive and was still determining its exact meaning. But he added that he understood the minimum price for between-network calls to be $0.07 and pricing on in-network calls to be &0.05.