No more hand-held phone chatting while driving

The Nation (14 Nov 2007)

In three months, drivers using a mobile phone without a hands free device will face a fine of Bt400-Bt1,000.

The National Legislative Assembly (NLA) Wednesday approved the amendment to the Land Transport Act, which will go into effect 90 days after publication in the Royal Gazette. The NLA committee vetting the bill had attached a notice to it, saying the partial prohibition would cover many motorists especially those in big cities with heavy traffic.A public relations campaign was needed for better understanding of the law and for easier enforcement by police. An equipment budget should be prepared for police to implement this new regulation effectively. The scrutinising committee had also urged moving towards an outright ban on all mobile phone usage while driving. Since traffic jams and road accidents cost the economy dearly, the government should improve and update the whole Land Transport Act and have National Police adjust Traffic Police operating procedures for faster and better enforcement of road rules.No one debated the bill, so the NLA president called for a show of hands, and it passed with 57 votes.

Mobile Number Portability (Pakistan)

From telecompk.net

Number portability allows consumers to switch phone providers and still keep their phone number. It started with local number portability and even that took a long time in many developed countries and it was not a very smooth experience for the consumers as they tried to switch companies.

Mobile number portability (MNP) is the big thing now which is changing the nature of the competition for mobile industry.

In U.S. only a couple of years ago the mobile phone companies started providing portability of mobile numbers. It takes significant resources to set up the rules and systems to take care of local or mobile number portability. Usually the regulatory agencies mandate number portability by a certain date and the phone companies try to extend these dates. Till now Japan did not have MNP. But this week mobile phone carries in Japan are engaging in fierce competition to take advanatage of the start of the mobile number portability.

(Above Picture) is an interesting survey result from ACNielsen. It shows that price is the main factor for switching service.

Pakistan is also about to experience MNP.

PTA has been studying MNP and supposedly has asked the providers to provide MNP by 2007. There is a study / paper on PTA website which gives details of their program. The interesting thing about Pakistan is that the area codes of the mobile phones are separate by the provider i.e. 0321 is Warid, 0300 is Mobilink. But how will it work after MNP?

The mobile companies have formed a MNP Consortium which will work through the details of MNP under PTA guidance. For sure MNP will change the market share. Recently Pakistan passed the 40 Million subsriber line. The growth may continue but mobile service providers will have to work hard to retain their customers!

Phone-number portability by end 2008

The Nation (14 November 2007)

The national telecom regulator is planning to announce regulations next month under which a scheme for phone-number portability will be implemented towards the end of next year.

The scheme will allow users of mobile and fixed-line telephones to switch networks without giving up their old numbers.

"The board will consider the final draft and launch the regulations in December, and then it will take about 8-10 months for telecom operators to prepare their networks and services," said National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) member Prasit Prapinmongkolkarn.

The NTC expects number-portability services to be launched in Thailand by the end of next year, he said.

The mobile-phone industry is expected to be the first to adopt the measure, followed by fixed-line services. Thailand has about 45 million mobile-phone subscribers and nearly 6 million fixed telephone lines.

Prasit said mobile-phone users would be charged a switching fee of about Bt150 to Bt300 for changing to another mobile-phone operator.

Meanwhile, the NTC is in the process of drafting the terms of reference for a clearing-house licence, under which a centre would be set up for registering and receiving networks of mobile operators. One of the centre's main tasks would be handling number shifts from one network to another.

Prasit said several companies were interested in conducting the clearing-house service, including two US companies: Telecordia Technologies and Synverse Technologies. However, NTC regulations stipulate that Thais must own 51 per cent of a company for it to be awarded a licence.

Prasit said the commission might not ask fixed-line operators to implement number-portability services, because that could interfere with geographical area codes, which indicate a caller's location.

"We may launch number portability for fixed-line services only within a region, such as within the North or the South. But portability for fixed-line services should not cover the whole country," he said.

Funds see steady growth in 2008

Bangkok Post (14 November 2007)

Fund managers say the market is expected to post steady growth in 2008, thanks to expectations of easing domestic political worries after the Dec 23 election.

Sukkawat Prasertying, chief investment officer at Manulife Asset Management, said growth in the mutual-fund industry next year would be strongest in foreign investment funds, short-term debt funds and local equity funds.

He said competition was expected to increase next year, with foreign players launching more innovative products and local, bank-owned asset-management companies leveraging their customer base and distribution network for growth.

Manulife Asset Management plans to launch a new foreign investment fund and a fixed-income fund next year.

''We have no policy to launch too many kinds of funds, but will instead focus on quality and return on investment,'' Mr Sukkawat said.

Panukorn Chantaraprapab, director for equities at Manulife Asset Management, said the Thai market remained attractive in the region thanks to relatively low valuations.

Oil prices were expected to remain high, raising costs for local companies, he added.

For the property sector, detached home sales were expected to slow in 2008, although demand for townhouses was likely to increase.

Meanwhile, Michael Feroli, an economist with US investment bank JPMorgan, said the US economy was ''bending, not breaking'', and that the weak dollar would help boost US exports.

Dr Feroli said the US economy was likely to show 3.5% growth in the third quarter of 2008 from 1% this quarter if the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates unchanged at 4.5%.

He said the overall outlook remained relatively bright, even though the US economy was expected to head into recession.

CAT board eases bidding requirements

Bangkok Post (14 November 2007)

Cat Telecom's board has reversed its decision on the 2.6-billion-baht automatically switched optical network (ASON) to allow more firms to participate in the bid if it generates a lack of interest.

Board spokesman Air Marshal Piriya Siriboon said on October 11 that companies must have successfully completed a project worth at least 390 million baht, or 15% of the project value, to qualify for the bid.

But last week CAT's board lowered the requirement to 260 million baht, or 10% of the project's value, if fewer than three bidders enter the bid, he said.

The board's decision was made in part because some bidders complained that the requirements disqualified them, ACM Piriya said.

But other bidders saw the 15% condition as fair and suitable since ASON project is significant to the state agency and changes to the bidding terms would only confuse bidders and unnecessarily delay the project, a source said.

The reversal was intended to revert the bid to the original terms, which required a company to have completed a project worth only 200 million baht, the source said. Nine telecom firms qualified for the bid under the 15% performance value requirement, the source added

Regulators seen moving swiftly on XBRL proposal

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. regulators may soon propose a requirement that companies file financial reports in a machine-readable code, known as Extensible Business Reporting Language or XBRL, a top U.S. regulator said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a Financial Executives International Conference in New York, John White, head of the division of corporate finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said his unit is working on creating a proposal for public comment on how companies should use the computer code.

"The staff has been asked to make a recommendation (on XBRL)," White said. "Translate that to mean a rule proposal on how this would be phased in."

Also speaking at the conference on Tuesday, Conrad Hewitt, the SEC's chief accountant, said the commission plans to expand its staff focusing on XBRL and asked companies to take a closer look at using the technology.

"Stay tuned on XBRL; it's coming down the pipe very fast," Hewitt told the audience of chief financial officers, corporate treasurers and comptrollers.

The SEC, which last month established an Office of Interactive Disclosure, has plans to increase the staff of that office from four people to 12, to help companies with XBRL, Hewitt said.

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox has been encouraging companies to report financial data using XBRL tags that would allow investors to more easily analyze the information in spreadsheet programs.

But many companies have hesitated amid concerns about XBRL's maturity and implementation costs.

Cox said in September that the U.S. XBRL group has completed all its work on developing data tags, or taxonomies, for U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, removing a major obstacle for companies hoping to use XBRL.

White, who at a separate conference in New York last week said he expected XBRL would eventually be "mandatory," said on Tuesday that he expected the SEC staff would recommend a final rule on XBRL next fall.

"At this point in time I would envision the final recommendation would phase it in," White said. "Before the staff would recommend a final rule in the fall, we would have to see successful, real use of the taxonomies in quarterly filings."

The taxonomies are expected to be made available for public comment and testing in December.
Robert Pozen, chairman of a 17-member committee created by the SEC to make financial reporting less complex, said at the conference on Monday that, while the group aims to come out with its final recommendations in August 2008, it hopes to make a recommendation on XBRL in January.

The group is weighing making suggestions on whether XBRL use should be mandatory or optional, on how the cost of adopting balances with its perceived benefits, and how auditors should be involved in the data-tagging process, Pozen said.

"We were told by (the division of corporate finance) at the SEC that that train is leaving the station -- they are moving very quickly on XBRL," Pozen said.

Yahoo expands mobile carrier deals across Asia

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc has struck new deals to offer mobile phone Web services through nine network operators across Asia, bolstering its increasing lead in the fastest growing regional market for mobile services by users.

The Silicon Valley-based Internet company also said on Tuesday that it was introducing a mobile service called Yahoo Go in traditional Chinese in Taiwan. These deals build on six earlier Asian carrier partnerships announced in June.

"Those 16 deals will give us roughly 40 percent coverage of all subscribers in those countries," Yahoo's top mobile executive, Marco Boerries, said in a phone interview.

Yahoo is racing to attract subscribers to Internet services delivered via mobile phones rather than computer browsers as rival Google Inc unveiled a plans to offer software to create a new class of Internet-ready phones.

Telecom carriers and Internet service providers are looking to capture a chunk of a market that research firm Gartner Inc sees generating advertising sales of $12.8 billion by 2011.

Boerries said there were more deals coming. "We have a clear goal to lead the market. The goal is to exceed 50 percent."

In Japan and China, Yahoo operates through joint ventures that handle all deal-making with mobile operators, Boerries said. It is working with China's Alibaba.com Corp on deals with carriers in the world's biggest mobile market.

Yahoo Japan is majority-owned by Softbank, the country's No. 3 mobile operator. Yahoo Web services also are offered via No. 1 carrier NTT DoCoMo via a non-exclusive deal.

The Yahoo partnership deals to be unveiled on Tuesday at an industry trade fair in Macau include three Indian carriers: Aircel Ltd, BPL Mobile and BSNL; two Malaysian carriers: DiGi Telecommunications Sdn Bhd and PT Excelcomindo Pratama Tbk two Indonesian carriers: Hutch 3 and PT Indosat Tbk, along with PCCW Mobile HK Ltd of Hong Kong and Starhub Ltd of Singapore.

Together with six earlier Asian partnerships set in June, Yahoo now has exclusive or preferred deals to have its Internet services featured on four of India's top eight carriers; all of Indonesia's top four carriers; Malaysia's No. 1 and No. 3 carriers; and the No. 2 and 3 carriers in Hong Kong.
Since introducing OneSearch, its Internet service for mobile phones, Yahoo has struck deals with 20 mobile operators worldwide. Its broadest deal, with Telefonica SA of Spain, covers up to 100 million phone subscribers in several European and Latin American markets.

Other than the Taiwan deal, the Asian partnerships call for carriers to feature Yahoo's mobile search service, OneSearch.

OneSearch lets users search the Web on the first screen they call up, in contrast to browsers designed for computer users that force phone users to navigate through several screens of links to locate the Web information they want.

This Yahoo service was first introduced in the United States earlier this year. It makes mobile Web search faster and more relevant by providing links to local news, financial data, weather conditions, Flickr photos, and other Web sites.

Hours earlier, Yahoo said it had begun offering a similar set of localized Internet services in Spanish or Portuguese to consumers in Latin America's three largest markets -- Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.

In recent weeks, Yahoo also has quietly begun offering Web search via SMS text messaging in Britain, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and the United States.

These direct-to-consumer services set the stage for Yahoo to strike deals with the region's mobile phone carriers to feature Yahoo mobile services on phones they offer subscribers, vastly expanding the Internet company's potential audience.

NIA seeks joint ventures

To encourage the expansion of business innovation, the National Innovation Agency (NIA) has partnered with local and international venture capitalists to set up a fund for joint ventures in Thai companies which have product innovation and potential to grow.

The fund is a result of cooperation among NIA, local venture-capital firm Vnet Capital, venture capitalist Japan Asia Investment (JAIC) and SME Bank. The fund has a budget of Bt210 million.
NIA's director Supachai Lorlowhakarn said the move was part of NIA's plans to move into the investment arena by providing funding support through a venture-capital model to help local companies expand.

"For four years we have been laying down basic infrastructure for innovation development by encouraging local companies to do product innovation and increase business. Now it's time to help them expand through new investment," Supachai said.

NIA's board recently approved a Bt50-million budget for the fund. JAIC, as the largest stakeholder in the fund, will contribute Bt100 million while SME Bank and Vnet Capital will provide Bt50 million and Bt10 million to the fund respectively.

As a local venture-capital firm, Vnet Capital will look after the fund management as the fund manager.

Set up under a new company called Thai Food and Innovation VCF, Supachai said the fund would run for 10 years and it hoped to make joint ventures in 16 Thai companies. The fund will focus on the food industry and will invest in at least two companies a year. The fund will invest between Bt20 million and Bt42 million in each project and in the first four years it has to make investments worth 60 per cent of the total fund value.

Potential projects for joint investment include coconut virgin oil, silk powder, O-rice, gara rice, original asparagus products and production of abalone. "We decided that around 60 per cent of investments will be in the food industry while the remaining investments can be in other strategic industries," Supachai said.

He added that the establishment of the fund was hoped to help local companies who had product innovation to expand and encourage them to move towards enterprise innovation, the next level of innovation development.

In the meantime, having a venture-capitalist partner from Japan will also assist local companies to get access to overseas markets, especially Japan, and this is a start for expansion to other countries.

Supachai said that as the fund was venture capitalist, it also aimed to bring business success to every project. The fund targets that each company it invests in will be listed on the Market for Alternative Investment within five years.

Making investments is another way NIA can encourage local companies to not only continue working on new innovation but also keep business and entrepreneurship in mind while opening for new investment from outside.

"It's necessary to put more focus on business and investment aspects so each innovative project attracts investors and this will move innovation development from product level to enterprise level," he said.

During the past three years, NIA has provided Bt241 million to support 218 innovation projects and this created around Bt6.1 billion of investment in the country.

An evaluation done by the Centre for Applied Economics Research at Chulalongkorn University found that each project supported by NIA could offer a higher internal rate of return.

By calculating the internal rate of return over 10 years, the report estimated that NIA projects could give an return of between 17 and 290 per cent while they also had net social benefit of 19 to 317 per cent.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation

Thailand: Parties' economic policies risky, say experts

From adnkronos.com (13 Nov 2007)

Bangkok, 13 Nov. (AKI) – Thailand's political parties have adopted policies that could contribute to an economic downturn in the leadup to the parliamentary elections in December.Several economists have said that the Thai economy is already slowing and could slip further with a slowdown in the US and higher oil prices. Exports contribute to 70 percent of Thailand’s gross domestic product and it is the largest oil importer in Asia when measured as a percentage of GDP.One of the country's leading investment banks, Phatra Securities, has warned that “more populist spending by the next government could seriously affect the country's fiscal position over the medium term."Thanong Khanthong, writing in the Thai newspaper ‘The Nation,’ stressed that Thailand needs "fiscal prudence" to assure economic stability.”“This is a dangerous way of thinking. Once we are hooked on populist spending, we can't stop. And the amount spent is going to become even greater in the future,” he added, referring to various parties’ plans. Experts said former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s populist policies have been adopted by every major political party and could lead to fiscal problems for the country, whose economy is struggling, experts have recently noted. The Asia Times, a political and financial portal, warned that “the spending could be unsustainable, although Thailand currently presents some financial space for more government spending.” Thailand’s official public debt stands at 37 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP, but, the Asia Times said that it rises to nearly 44 percent when including off-balance sheet liabilities. Thaksin’s direct populist legacy is guaranteed by the People's Power Party (PPP), now considered the front runner in the December 23 vote. Nevertheless, research conducted by Phatra Securities shows that the Democrats stand a good chance of forming the next coalition government even if they win fewer seats than the PPP."Still neither is likely to form a strong coalition government," said Phatra. "Both would be reliant on the loyalty of medium-sized political parties."It said a defection by any one of the medium-sized coalition partners could bring the coalition government down.The PPP wants to maintain the populist policies introduced by Thaksin, which include a village fund, a debt moratorium for farmers, and virtual universal health care.The party also aims to go ahead with the ambitious infrastructure spending plans first proposed by Thaksin and valued at some 44 billion dollars over five years. Following in the footsteps of Thaksin is the Democrat Party, which used to criticise Thaksin’s populist economic policies If elected, the Democrats have promised mandatory free education for 12 years, free medical care, more financial benefits for retirees and debt restructuring for the poor. They have also promised “to restore the country's neo-liberal credentials” and launch an impressive infrastructure plan that includes at least three new mass transit train lines in Bangkok, a major renovation of the country's railway system and an expansion of irrigation systems in rural areas.Other parties have also pledged several spending initiatives.