24 June 2008

Jasmine International, under the new leadership of Pete Bodharamik, has set an aggressive target to triple its revenue to exceed Bt10 billion within the next two years by invading True Corp's broadband Internet business in Bangkok.

In his first interview with the press since becoming the chief executive officer of Jasmine three months ago, Pete, the only son of former commerce minister Adisai Bodharamik who founded the company, said Jasmine would rapidly penetrate Bangkok's wired and wireless broadband Internet market with a goal to triple its subscriber numbers to 1 million by 2010.

Jasmine, whose subsidiary TT&T has a fixed-line telephone concession in the provinces, has until recently been focused on the upcountry high-speed Internet market under its Maxnet brand, with 300,000 households as subscribers. "Most of the new subscribers from now until 2010 will be Bangkok residents," he said.

Pete said that in the past Jasmine had been too stable, with its annual revenue staying in the range of Bt4 billion to Bt6 billion for many years because the firm had relied too much on concession businesses such as its submarine cable network. The new Jasmine, he said, would become more "fun", following the working culture of Mono Group, a media company owned and founded by himself.

Jasmine will need to invest only Bt1.5 billion to Bt2 billion to expand its broadband Internet to Bangkok or about Bt5,000 to Bt6,000 per subscriber, since the firm already has a network running in the provinces surrounding Bangkok. To compete with True, which is banking on its convergence strategy, Jasmine will instead win over consumers with its "openness".

Now if you are in Starbucks, you must be a customer of TrueMove's mobile-phone network to use True's WiFi. If you are a subscriber of AIS, you can't use it conveniently, he said.

Hence, Pete said Jasmine would join forces with AIS and DTAC, each of which has more mobile-phone subscribers than True, to allow their mobile-phone subscribers to pay Jasmine's WiFi fee on their monthly phone bills.

Pete said Jasmine had done surveys and found there are still large areas in the Bangkok market that True can't cover.

"We're preparing for a fully fledged expansion and will cover the whole of Bangkok within one or two months," he said.

To establish WiFi, Jasmine is going to launch its Spider wireless hotspots at 10,000 points nationwide by the end of this year, of which 6,000 to 7,000 will be in Bangkok.