Vodafone Malta believes there is still room for growth in Malta’s mature mobile market but at the same time is very interested in the up-coming fast broadband data services over fibre optic cables to the home. The increasing use of smartphones, applications and machine-to-machine communication is expected to fuel the growth in the mobile market.

In an exclusive interview with i-Tech, his first with the Maltese press, Balesh Sharma, the new chief executive officer of Vodafone Malta, shared his views on the current situation of the Maltese communications market and its future, which he believes will be positive, with his company playing a significant role.

Mr Sharma, 46, is a mechanical engineer by training but then moved into sales, marketing and general management, with all posts based in his country of origin, India. He worked for large international corporations such as Xerox and Ricoh, and held top posts in management in telecommunications for the last 16 years. His last post before Malta was as chief executive officer of Vodafone Gujarat, which is the largest and most profitable operation for Vodafone India. During his stint there the company’s subscriber base increased from two million to 13 million and revenues tripled.

Mr Sharma is confident that although the Maltese mobile market is mature, with over 100 per cent penetration, there is still room for growth.

“What I bring in is my experience of handling very complex and very highly competitive markets and therefore I will bring that experience to the local market which is also a very well saturated and very competitive market,” Mr Sharma said.

“We must ensure that we continue to grow, enhance our relationship with our customers, get to know our customers better and where possible cater to the individual requirements of our customers. I will question the basics and try to bring a new way of thinking for myself and the team.”

But how can Vodafone sustain the growth of the market and increase revenue when there are virtually no new users to add?

“Typically in any industry you can grow the market further by adding more subscribers, or by adding different types of uses or by more usage. In Malta’s case it is saturated in terms of number of subscribers, however you can definitely get your subscribers to use more and use differently, and that is where we step into the real growth which is coming up now. It’s like what happened to messaging five or six years ago and is happening to mobile data right now.

“People are no longer happy to be glued to one screen and sit there and chat. They want their Facebook while they are having coffee at the cafeteria and when they are moving around in St. Julian’s. I don’t agree that Malta is a stagnating market. It is stagnating on only one of the three pillars of growth. The other two pillars are completely open. That’s where growth will come from.”

A new exciting prospect for Vodafone Malta could be very fast data access services through fibre optic cables, something which the Maltese government is already working on.

“We, as an organisation, do really believe it is the way to go,” said Mr Sharma when questioned about the so-called ‘fibre-to-the-home’ very fast internet access.

“It will increase the capability of what can be done. People can be shooting movies and sharing them on Twitter, or be keeping an eye on their home while they are abroad,”

Such a statement might seen a little bit odd coming from a company that is the local market leader in mobile communications and does not own a fixed-cable network such as its direct competitors Go or Melita.

“We are a telecommunications company and fibre-to-the-home is a project that will be certainly interested in,” reiterated Vodafone’s CEO. “There is not much we can say from our side because the government is in various stages of discussions and we are fully co-operating and participating. If there is any other part of the world that can do it, Malta can do it better because of the population density and size but the commercial aspect has to be worked upon. Vodafone will be very interested in seeing it succeed and happen as quickly as possible.”

Late last year an independent German company certified Vodafone Malta as having the fastest mobile communications network in Malta, the result of a €12 million investment that upgraded the network to provide a download speed of 14.4 Mps. The fruit of this investment is already being reaped and the company’s clients have already responded, according to Mr Sharma.

“An interesting aspect of data services is that the demand is related to the capability so if you were able to give data services through dial-up internet access 15 years ago there was only so much customers could do with that data. Then we could give data through packet switching and customer’s possibilities increased as the capability of the device increased. Now I can give data with the 3G pipe and this opened up the world to customers. This is already being reflected in the adoption of smartphones and mobile data that is happening on the island. This is happening because we got to that kind of speeds.”

Such speeds allow smartphone users to watch YouTube videos or even live TV broadcasts such as with the free Al Jazeera iPhone app. However Mr Sharma was not in a position to give details on the availability of the Apple iPad tablet in Malta, though he reassured that Vodafone will promote and support the use of tablets locally.

Speaking of TV, i-Tech asked whether Vodafone Malta is still interested in providing TV access services like its competitors, which, unlike Vodafone, can provide all the four so-called quad play services (fixed-line calls, mobile, TV access and internet access).

“We are open to exploring TV services but currently there no plans to enter the TV arena that I can talk of. Being out of the TV business is not a disadvantage, since it is an unrelated market which is not directly linked to the mobile industry. The fact that we are not in the TV business does not mean we are giving lesser value to our customers. Bundling is strong but it is ultimately discounting in some way. Is there a synergy we are missing on or are we at a huge competitive disadvantage by not providing a TV access service? I think neither. However, are we certainly looking at options at all times.”

One thing which seems to be very at heart to the new Vodafone CEO is corporate social responsibility.A few days within taking over in Malta he had to face the crisis in Egypt and Libya, two of Malta’s neighbouring countries.

While he reassured that the Libyan crisis did not have any negative impact on the Maltese telecommunications systems, he revealed Vodafone took two important initiatives in recent weeks.

“We worked to identify our customers who were stuck in Libya and could not be re-charging and gave them credits as required because their need for communication was probably more than anybody else’s. We did the same thing for Egypt even before the crisis in Libya. The second thing that we did, which was unique for us, was that as the ships full of foreign evacuees arrived in Malta from Libya, even in the middle of the night, we had our volunteers at the harbour distributing Vodafone SIM cards and sometimes even free top-ups to those who could not afford them to be able to be connected to the world the moment they landed. We kept it low-key because ultimately it is people’s well-being being we have at heart,” reiterated Mr Sharma.