CAT Telecom will ask the national telecom regulator to consider reducing its licence fee, the company's president told a press conference here late last week.

Phisal Jorphochaudom said CAT paid total licence fees of about Bt700 million last year to the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), adding that the amount was too high for the state agency.

Kitisak Sriprasert, CAT's senior executive vice president for corporate strategy, said the company would explain to the NTC its costs of operating all types of telecom services, so that the regulator could come up with an appropriate formula of computing licence-fee rates.

"Moreover, we will ask the licensing body to explain how it spends our licence fee. We think the NTC should return some portion of the fee to us to help us invest further in business expansion," said Kitisak.

He said that this year CAT would be more aggressive in seeking new licences to diversify its operations.

The NTC has opened up CAT's long-entrenched gold-mine of the international-call market by granting international-call licences to several companies, including Advanced International Network, True and Total Access Communication.

CAT, which earlier had no domestic network, is set to make the official launch of its Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) 2000-1x cellular service in 51 provinces in April.

It targets 150,000 subscribers this year and revenues of Bt700 million.

Phisal said CAT intended to finish talking with Hutchison-CAT in six months on a possible joint marketing of their CDMA service on their two separate networks. Hutchison-CAT, a joint venture between CAT and Hong Kong's telecom giant Hutchison Telecom, has marketed the CDMA service via its own network in 25 provinces. Currently it has about 700,000 subscribers.

Phisal said CAT would also spend about Bt300 million this year to revitalise its brand image.

CAT posted total revenues of Bt31.193 billion last year with a net profit of Bt4.616 billion.

Of the total revenues, 32 per cent was from international calls, 24 per cent from data communications, 7 per cent from cellular services, 34 per cent from concession revenues and the rest from the other businesses.

Phisal said that this year, CAT had targeted a net profit of Bt5 billion but declined to specify the revenue target.

CAT made international-call revenues of Bt9.947 billion last year, down from Bt11.218 billion in 2005, while its revenues from the concession fee stood at Bt10.6 billion, up from Bt9.8 billion in 2005.

Its revenue share from Hutchison-CAT declined to Bt2.054 billion last year, from Bt2.189 billion the year before.

Usanee Mongkolporn

The Nation

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