Syahrial Ali's Blog

There was a big news this week when the biggest CDMA operator Telkom Flexi intended to merge with Bakrietel Esia. The CEO of PT Telkom, Rinaldi Firmansyah has sent the letter to Ministry of State Own Enterprise, Mr. Mustafa Abubakar concerning this. The minister has given the green light, so Telkom can proceed with their plan.

The negotiation shall be started to reach the win-win solution. As we know, Telkom Flexi is the biggest CDMA operator in Indonesia with currently 15 million subscribers, while Bakrietel Esia is the second with just below 10 million subscribers. When the merger happened, the CDMA market will be monopolized by these operators.

There were different views about this merger. Some argue that this merger will make unhealthy competition in CDMA business. They will dictate the market as they have 80% of the market share. Some others see there are several advantages of this merger for both companies. Telkom and Bakrie can deliver better services to all subscribers since they have adequate bandwidth to play with. They will have more efficient cost both in operational and expenditure.

Above all, we as the customer, not only want better services but also affordable tariff.

According to the data from Directorate General of Post and Telecommunication of Republic Indonesia,  there was a big change in the number of cellular subscribers’ data at the end of 2009. Since 2004, Telkomsel was the leader in cellular business, followed by Indosat and XL. However, since the end of 2009, XL was promoted to the second place ahead of Indosat.

At the end of 2009, the number of Indosat’ subscriber was down to 28.6 million, from 36.4 million at the end of 2008. Meanwhile, XL’s subscriber was 31.4 million, increased quite significant number, 5.5  million, from just below 26 million at the same period. Telkomsel was still the leader with more than 81 million subscribers.

In the fixed wireless access, Telkom flexi continues their lead with more than 15 million subscribers, followed by Bakrietel Esia with almost 10 million.

For new entries, HCPT led with 7.3 million subscriber followed by Natrindo Axis with 4.1 million.

The complete data can be found below. (more…)