Telkomsel ready to lease its towers

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - President director of PT Telkomsel Kiskenda Suriahardja said the company was ready to to lease its telecommunication towers to other telecommunication operators.

"We are ready to have our towers leased, and not only our towers but also other infrastructure including networks," Kiskenda told the media in the presence of president director of state telecommunication company PT Telkom Rinaldi Firmansyah, finance director of PT Telkom Sudiro Asno, and Executive Vice President for Strategic Investment and Corporate Planning of PT Telkom Tbk, David Berg, at the Telkom office in Jakarta on Friday.

Kiskenda said he still has no exact figures on the number of towers that could be leased but it has been estimated that 60 percent of the total of 21,000 BTS comprising 12,600 towers could be leased.

Telkomsel followed five principles in leasing its towers to other operaters, namely that technically priority would be given to Telkom Flexi, but basically as the saying goes "the early bird gets the worm", based on needs and agreement.

Kiskenda said that Telkomsel has set up a special unit to handle the leasing of if towers and infrastructure.

In 2007 Telkomsel had built 4,900 BTS bringing the total number of BTS to 20,.884.

Kiskenda said that the number of Telkomsel subscribers reached 47.89 million up to the end of 2007.

"The number of net Telkomsel subscribers has increased to 12.2 million in 2007, bringing the total number of subscribers to 47.89 million by the end of 2007," Kiskenda said.

For 2008, Telkomsel projected the number of its subscribers to reach 9 million.

"We still have a commitment to reach 8 to 9 million subscribers, while our projection reached 50 percent of the market share. We predicted that the number of our subscribers would reach 18 million," Kiskenda said.

Telkomsel will apply three strategies in boosting its business operations, namely with regard to scope by covering the whole of Indonesia by building more BTS facilities and new areas.

"The second strategyu will be focused on increasing quality especially in areas where competition is tight, and the third strategy is on entering new lines of business from upstream to downstream sectors," Kiskenda added.