Jasmine, a winner of last week’s marathon 87-hour Thai 900-MHz auction, will build on its fixed line market and existing retail networks to pursue a rapid expansion.
The company will target 2 million subscribers in its first year rising to 5 million subscribers and 10% of the $8.3 billion (300-billion baht) mobile and IoT market in three years.
Speaking to journalists at the first press conference after winning the much coveted 900-MHz licence, Jasmine CEO Pete Bhodaramik said that it was wrong to call Jasmine as a new entrant as it already had two million households - or roughly eight million customers - for its 3BB fixed line network which covers 75% of the districts of Thailand.
He said that he expects the typical Jas Mobile subscriber to consume half their data over WiFi offload.
Jasmine will need to pay $2.1 billion (75.65 billion baht) for the licence and will raise funds through an IPO of JasMobile and through leveraging Jas Infrastructure Fund as collateral with banks. He stressed that Jasmine itself would not see any share dilution through additional investment and repeatedly pleaded with shareholders to remain confident in him.
Not that the markets listened - the Stock Exchange of Thailand responded to the aftermath of the sky-high auction results with a bloodbath. Jasmine shares were down an eye-watering 22.6% at the end of the day, which was almost as bad as Dtac that saw over a quarter of its value wiped out in one day for losing both auctions (-26.9%).
Fellow auction loser AIS shares crashed 19.4% while fellow winner TrueMove is not publicly traded but parent company True shares ended the day down just 8.9%.
Pete thanked the NBTC for the revised payment terms - 8 billion baht now, then 4 billion at the end of years one and two and the rest a year later - saying that it had allowed a new entrant like himself into the market.
“We do have a foreign partner, but I will not tell you who,” he said, refusing to confirm if it was indeed SK Telecom or Softbank as has been rumoured.
Jasmine will roll out over 20,000 cell sites and has already mapped out their locations. He said he usually prefers a single-vendor approach but in this case might use two vendors, again not elaborating on which supplier he had in mind.
Jas Mobile will partner with a state enterprise which already has towers, but again Pete refused to say whether it was CAT or TOT.
As for voice, Pete said he would either do VoLTE or a roaming agreement with someone and again, no decision has been made yet.
Jasmine already has 6,000 staff and 300 shops. He said the LTE network would add just hundreds of staff to the existing organisation.