What a mobile operator's chief executive has to understand in detail

I have led one in-market mobile merger from the first board paper to the last decommissioned site, and I now run a company that lives under the undertakings it gave. The hard work is less the deal than the eighteen months after it. We sequenced our integration in four stages: core network and billing first, then radio, then retail and dealer channels, then internal systems. Each stage carried a customer measure beside its cost measure, such as dropped-call rates in swapped districts and complaint volumes after billing migration. Remedy compliance sits with a dedicated team that reports to the Board Risk and Sustainability Committee rather than to me, and an independent auditor reviews our wholesale offer to virtual operators every year, a condition the regulator added to our own proposals. I treat each undertaking as a product commitment with an owner, a budget and a service level, because a remedy honoured late is, from the regulator's side, a remedy not honoured.

Malaysia built its first 5G network as a single wholesale network owned by a state company, and operators buy capacity from it rather than each holding its own 5G spectrum. Seralis, like most large operators, now also holds a minority stake in that company. The arrangement changes the economics I learnt elsewhere. Our 5G cost is largely variable and contracted, while our 4G cost is fixed and tied to the spectrum we hold in the 900, 1800 and 2600 MHz bands, with annual fees attached. My job is to decide which traffic belongs on which layer and what each gigabyte costs to carry. We report cost per gigabyte by district and by technology every month. That report showed that fixed-wireless homes in suburbs could be served profitably on capacity freed by the merger, and that a premium on 5G handset tariffs would not survive the first competitor who declined to charge one.

I have negotiated most of the forms of network sharing an operator can sign: passive site sharing in Sarawak, tower sale-and-leaseback transactions for a regional group, and an active radio-access sharing agreement in Cambodia in which each operator kept its own spectrum and core network but shared the radio equipment on 2,100 rural sites. The financial case is usually easy to make. The difficult parts are the ones contracts tend to leave vague: who repairs a shared site first after a storm, how upgrades are paid for when one partner wants capacity and the other does not, and how either side leaves. I now insist on a joint fault centre, restoration penalties that apply in both directions and an exit mechanism priced on the first day. I also keep a simple test for where sharing should stop. If a customer can feel the difference in coverage or speed, the asset is competitive; if not, building it twice is waste.

Messaging apps took most of the SMS and international-call revenue that once made up a large share of a Southeast Asian operator's profit, and global video and music services now own the relationship with the viewer. I do not think operators should answer by buying exclusive content. At Altirra and then Seralis we stopped committing to fixed minimum payments for bundled streaming services and moved to revenue-sharing terms without exclusivity, sold through carrier billing, which matters in a market where many prepaid customers have no credit card. Bundles now account for about 6 per cent of postpaid revenue and are priced as discounts, judged by what they do to churn. Where we can still earn a place is in what the platforms need from us: billing, identity checks made with the customer's consent, reliable capacity at peak hours and a presence in small-town shops through our 38,000 dealers and reload points.

Seralis has three large shareholders with different interests: a government-linked investment company with 24 per cent, Teguh Permata Holdings Berhad with 19 per cent and Corvantis Group with 14 per cent. All three nominate directors, and two are also commercial counterparties through roaming, enterprise contracts and shared services. Bursa Malaysia's rules on related-party transactions, including the shareholder mandate for recurrent transactions of a revenue or trading nature, frame much of my work with the Audit Committee. I keep three disciplines. Requests from any shareholder reach the board through the chair, never through me alone. Requests with a public purpose are priced and tested against what our licence and the universal service programme already require. And every transaction with a shareholder group carries an independent benchmark. The Malaysian Code on Corporate Governance expects a board that acts for all shareholders, and I would rather show that in the minutes than claim it in a report.