Asia Telecoms is poised to become the first Mobile Virtual Network Operator in Malaysia. MW meets up with its CEO Danesh Pannirselvam to find out just how he plans to eat up the competition.

Kashminder Singh

MW: Tell us what Asia Telecoms does.
DP: We provide solutions that help corporations keep their phone bills low. Our VOIP solution and other products do that without compromising call quality. We also sell wholesale call traffic between countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. Recently, we have started selling a very simple system

MW: How’s business?
DP: Great! We are among the top three in this industry. That’s because we have stressed quality and have stayed away from price wars. In fact we are probably the most expensive but most companies end up using our services because we can assure them of uninterrupted service.

MW: How did you get started in the telecommunications industry?
DP: While studying in UK, I wrote a paper on the future of telecommunications. I then sent that paper to telcos in Europe asking for a chance to work on those ideas. I ended up in Greece, which incidentally has one of the largest telco R&D facilities in Europe.



MW: Greece!?!
DP: Actually I had quite a few Greek friends then, including my girlfriend. I even picked up the language which made it easier. It was a dream job for me. I worked on technologies like GSM and what is today known as 3G. This was 10 years ago, mind you, so the experience was very valuable.

MW: Why did you come back to Malaysia?
DP: I wanted to bring my vision of telecommunications into reality and I felt that Asia was the future of telecommunications. I came back to Malaysia but my dream is still to take Asia by storm. Now you know why we gave our company this name.

MW: Was it easy to get started?
DP: The opposite actually. My partner, Sritharan, and I knew what we wanted to do but no one wanted to lend us money. No one believed in us. We financed our start-up creatively. We went to a supplier of telco equipment who had spare inventory and asked them to give us the items on credit. In return, we arranged for them to receive our entire income until we fully paid up for the hardware. We were confident that it would take six months to do so. We ended up paying them back in three months.

MW: Asia Telecoms is the first company to receive an MVNO license from MCMC. What does that allow you to do?
DP: The Mobile Virtual Network Operator license allows us to buy mobile capacity from any of our telcos and create our own mobile service. We won’t set up our own infrastructure like telecommunications towers etc. We will buy the services from the telcos and brand it as our own. But we will have our own 01X prefix and we will be able to provide complete mobile services to clients.

MW: What strategy will you adopt?
DP: We won’t be competing with the big telcos; we will complement them. Our service would emphasise the applications. I won’t sell you a 3G service. Instead I will sell you a lifestyle that is built on 3G. In short, I want to sell you experiences, emotions and not a technology. How about a service that allows drivers to stream traffic reports from their cars to a central server so that instead of 10 traffic cameras, we have a potential of tens of thousands of traffic cameras? Now that would be great.