Cambodia continues to benefit from the growth of telecoms and Internet services - but is the growth truly sustainable?

The gimlet eye of DevelopingTelecomsWatch roves back to Cambodia today, where a mobile operator given a fair amount of coverage here for its impressive subscriber growth is also quickly carving out a huge slice of the country's ADSL market.

That cellco is one whose aggressive pricing has stimulated comment here more than once, most recently in an article about a bitter dispute over cutthroat tariffs between two of its rival MNOs. It is this brutally competitive nature of the rather crowded Cambodian mobile market which prompted global emerging markets player Millicom International Cellular to sell its stake in one of the players in this rather rough game.

The MNO doing well in the broadband space is Metfone, an offshoot of Viettel, an operator from neighbouring Vietnam which is owned by that county's military establishment. Viettel, as discussed in a March DTW article about telecoms organisations affiliated with the governments of socialist regimes, has built a strategy around delivering services to lower income population segments. Low prices are clearly an important component of that strategy. For Metfone, the aforementioned strong growth has yielded an estimated 15.06% market share (by end-August) according to WCIS. This has been achieved in just seven months, the operator having launched services in February of this year.

So, while the likes of Millicom balk at the notion of the razor-thin margins that very aggressive pricing must yield in an already lower-ARPU market, Metfone's Vietnamese owners are less squeamish. I have opined here more than once that the company's being rooted in the state of a socialist country must confer on its managers a quite different view of acceptable levels of profitability than the ones expected in more orthodox market economies.

This formula, however, undeniably produces strong consumer acceptance of communication services. Now, according to a recent TeleGeography article, which states that Metfone now commands 60% of Cambodia’s ADSL market and 50% of the country’s landline connections.

The affordability of broadband may soon receive another boost in the southeast Asian county. Nathan Green of the Phnom Penh Post writes that Cambodia's connection to a high-bandwidth fibre-optic cable linking Southeast Asia to the United States is expected to go live before the end of this year, and that services will be of a higher quality than those enabled by current connectivity in the county. This is apparently because connectivity is presently sourced from operators in Thailand and Vietnam that tend to provide the country only with their overflow capacity.

So telecoms and Internet services continue to penetrate Cambodian society, although this improved availability is in some cases being driven by pricing strategies which may not be sustainable if commercial logic (as most of us understand it) is applied.