Singapore's Pacific Internet & Malaysia's Time in venture
Singapore, Feb 17 (Asia Pulse) - NASDAQ-listed Pacific Internet Ltd of Singapore has teamed up with Malaysia's Time dotCom to establish a joint venture company to provide narrowband and broadband Internet services to businesses in Malaysia.
Pacific Internet announced today that the two parties had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and negotiations to form the company, with Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) status, were expected to be completed soon.
Pacific Internet said in a statement it was also considering listing the joint-venture company in Malaysia's technology stocks exchange, Malaysian Exchange of Securities Dealing and Quotation (MESDAQ), in the near future. The joint venture company would use the network of TIME dotCom subsididary, TIME Telekom, Malaysia's second fixed line operator, which spans 5,200km covering the North-South Expressway and Peninsular Malaysia. It would look into various Internet packaged applications including web-hosting, chat instant messaging, virtual communities and e-commerce.
The initial concentration would be to build content portals for the financial, health and retail sectors. "We are very excited about this new joint venture as we believe that our ISP with Time dotCom has the potential of becoming an aggressive Internet company in Malaysia through the leveraging of Time dotCom's existing customer base, advanced fibre optics network and extensive wireless network.
"We will also be able to provide our regional corporate customers with high quality access to and from their Malaysian offices," said Pacific Internet chief executive officer Nicholas Lee. TIME dotCom, which is wholly-owned by Time Engineering Bhd, has two other subsidiaries, Time Wireless and Time Reach, and currently has over 400,000 subscribers from fixed line, wireless and payphone businesses.
Malaysia will be the eighth country within the operations of Pacific Internet which already has a presence in countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, Philippines, Australia and India.