Chunghwa Telecom Co (CHT, 中華電信), the nation’s biggest telecom operator, yesterday said that it has inked a memorandum of understanding with CAT Telecom PCL to develop smart city services in Thailand as part of renewed efforts to explore new revenue sources in emerging Southeast Asian markets.
Chunghwa Telecom’s latest move came after it tapped into the Vietnamese market 12 years ago via a joint venture with Viettel Group to establish Viettel-CHT Co, providing telecom technology and helping the state-run company build a data center.
“Chunghwa Telecom aims to provide information and communications technology solutions to our partners in Southeast Asian countries by integrating our software capabilities with hardware,” company president Harrison Kuo (郭水義) said in a statement.
Photo: CNA
“With the signing of the memorandum, the companies will kick-start a series of new joint projects, further deepening the partnership,” Kuo said.
Chunghwa Telecom is to assist CAT Telecom in offering smart city-related applications, including intelligent video surveillance systems, automated license plate recognition and smart street lamps, as well as in building a data center, the statement said.
The company expects to develop at least three to five sizable projects within a year to provide niche applications, it said.
It is also considering forming a joint venture with CAT Telecom to propel the partnership to the next level, the Central Agency News (CNA) reported on Thursday.
CAT Telecom, 100 percent owned by the Thai Ministry of Finance, last reported revenue of 76 billion baht (US$2.52 billion).
Chunghwa Telecom in 2017 invested NT$10 million (US$329,848 at the current exchange rate) to establish fully owned subsidiary Chunghwa Telecom (Thailand) Co in Bangkok. Earlier this year, it invested an additional NT$30 million in the unit, which provides virtual Internet services and value-added cloud-enabled services.
Apart from Thailand, Chunghwa Telecom aims to make inroads in Indonesia later this year, aiming to duplicate its success in Vietnam, CNA said.
Chunghwa Telecom posted revenue of NT$17.55 billion for last month, down 3.8 percent from NT$18.24 billion a year earlier.
The telecoms attributed the decline to falling mobile services revenue due to intensifying competition and lower revenue from fixed-line voice calls.
Net profit last month contracted 2.9 percent year-on-year from NT$2.91 billion to NT$2.82 billion, while earnings per share slid from NT$0.37 to NT$0.36, company data showed.
In the first 11 months of this year, revenue fell 4.4 percent year-on-year to NT$187.38 billion, the data showed, further evidence that the telecoms is likely to miss its revenue target of between NT$221 billion and NT$223 billion for the whole year.
Net profit fell 7.1 percent annually from NT$32.66 billion to NT$30.34 billion in the period, while earnings per share slid from NT$4.21 to NT$3.91, the data showed.
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