Executive summary
Mobile market in Laos still struggling to find right direction
The telecom sector in Laos still has numerous issues to address. The rate of regulatory reform continues to be well behind wider industry development, even for a developing economy like Laos. The delays in reform have the potential to derail the good progress already made if the process is not speeded up.
The mobile sector in particular has been going through a difficult period. Following the Beeline saga back in 2011/2012, the fallout was still being felt into 2015. A cloud of uncertainty seems to be hanging over the whole market. Subscriber growth is weak after the market had gone backwards for a while. The cellcos are now operating in an environment where the regulator is keeping a tight hold on pricing and competition is in effect discouraged. A further problem emerging for the mobile operators is that network performance is deteriorating across the board. This in turn highlighted two important issues – there has been insufficient investment by the operators in the areas of network maintenance and upgrades, and, secondly, there are obvious deficiencies in the regulatory environment in how the authorities apply and manage network performance standards. It is understood that the MPT had started to address the latter problem in 2015.
- See more at: http://www.budde.com.au/Research/Laos-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband.html#.dpuf