Dear all,
I haven’t provided any updates for a while so today seemed like a good time since we have had an eventful past 2 weeks. On balance it is quite positive, though we have a mix of some very good news and some not so good news:
Good News (Wins):
1. Tesco Mobile has today confirmed another 3 month extension on our mandate to support them with their JV with CAT in Thailand. There is strong support for us in Tesco Thailand and UK, and our customer is acting as our internal advocate which is exactly where we aim to be as a trusted adviser.
2. Axiata Group CMO has confirmed another 6 month extension on our mandate to support them with their MVNO establishment in Thailand. The new phase of work may see a partnership change to Virgin Mobile instead of Tune Talk, however this remains confidential and undecided so this is internal information only.
3. Axiata Group M&A has confirmed (verbally, to be formalised next week) a re-engagement for Iran which will see us support Axiata for a MVNO host network negotiation, plus do an acquisition pre-due diligence of the host operator in parallel. We will have a team put together for this in the coming week (it will involve travel to Iran, led by me).
4. Thaicom has asked us to go to negotiate with the procurement committee tomorrow morning for a large new project on Thailand Consumer Satellite Broadband Feasibility which we have been developing for a few months. I am confident on winning this one, to start end of this month and run until end November.
Not so good news (Losses):
1. A project we had been developing in NBTC for Digital TV and Radio was cancelled after insufficient qualified bids were received (our was qualified but the other 2 were not). This project will be re-bid in Q4 but the outcome is now uncertain. This was unfortantely our own fault as a firm and not something we ever want to repeat.
2. A bid for a national NBN project with MICT we had spent almost one year developing as a project, and which a few of us spent 20 hours over the weekend alone working on, was submitted late after the deadline last Monday by our prime contract partner, KPMG. Today the Committee confirmed KPMG’s bid will not be accepted. We are therefore not able to participate in this project unless one of the 2 other bidders fails to qualify, in which case we will re-bid with KPMG and have a strong chance of winning since they had the best credentials. This is bitterly disappointing but there was no fault on our part, so this one goes down to a situation out of our control which we must accept as a lesson learned in selecting and managing our prime contract partners who are sometimes less competent than we assume.