Singtel to build on scale for new offerings

“Singtel wants to be the first-choice communications and entertainment provider for its customers,” said Arthur Lang, chief executive officer of Singtel International. “It wants to delight and excite them about coming to visit Singtel’s platform every single day.”
The mission of Singtel International is to create what Lang calls the digital glue “to connect its current 700 million subscribers”, because it’s “only by hunting as a pack that a company wins in the digital world”.
He said that companies require scale in the digital world and that’s why Singtel Group “needs to bring these 700 million subscribers together and that’s why the company needs to create the digital glue”. 
“My challenge is to think about the types of digital glue that can bring us all together,” he said.
“The first digital glue is the payment side, while second one is gaming and e-sports. I look forward to having more glue to make the kind of stickiness that could ensure a really good asset of the 700 million subscribers. In the telco world, these numbers can be fragmented, but they can come together in the digital world.”
Singtel Group’s 700 million-plus subscribers are spread across six operators in the 20 countries. “In just the Asean region alone, about 70 per cent of over 300 million customers are below the age of 35 – these are the young millennial type of customer,” Lang said. 
“We are not just about being a telco. We want to think about how we can create a platform for millennials who want to come and visit our platform. So it can be with payments, it can be with a new content platform, it can be gaming, short-form content, user-generated content, or any other types of content, including sport.”
Lang said Singtel wants to drive increases in the number of daily active users (DAUs) rather than focusing on the ranks of monthly active users (MAUs), as the former is about customer engagement and that is a good business model on which to build profits.
“We want customers to come to our platform on any single day many times. How do we get them here? It could be payments, games, digital content, short-form videos – there are many ways to do this,” he said.
Once Singtel moves up to go beyond being merely a telecom services provider, the sources of average revenue per user (ARPU) will come not just from telecoms and data, “they will come from new type of content, games, and payment and the like”, Lang said. However, such revenue would still be booked as ARPU. 

Among the winners
“In the digital world, some new digital players will win, but not all will win. For the more established companies like ourselves, if we play this right and execute wisely, we can win as well,” said Lang.
He said all business lines are important. “The mobile wallet segment is now very small, but it will help the company to really create stickiness for customers and our engagement with customers,” Lang said. “From there, the company can build on many other services.”
Across the Singtel Group it has 50 million users of mobile wallet services. It aims to have 400 to 500 million users in three to five years across the region.
“We can handle all payments and we can distribute financial products like insurance and securities. We can do a lot of things to help really grow Asean and integrate Asean in the digital economy,” said Lang.
He said that in the digital world, it is all about partnerships. “What the company wants is just to grow the ecosystem; it is not to drive mobile payment adoption. Let’s work together to make customers’’ lives easier. The VIA platform, owned by Singtel, generates revenue shared across members of this alliance,” he said.
“We as a group can go together and actually build out the network of (mobile) wallets. I would like to call it a star alliance of (mobile) wallet services. It is the borderless mobile wallet; you can travel globally but pay locally.”
Financial services are a crucial business for Singtel Group, he said. “Those who own bank accounts are in the minority in several countries in the region, such as Thailand and Indonesia,” Lang said.
“How does the company actually get people to use these financial products? It is really through the mobile platform that this can be done. 
“How to reach them - reaching the unbanked population, reaching the democratising payment and fintech. This is very important. Payment is fundamental and fintech is a natural extension. Once we have payments, it can be progressed and evolve into fintech. But the fundamental thing is payment. Payment is very important for all mobile companies.”
Some 75 per cent of Singtel’s profit, about S$3.9 billion to S$4 billion, comes from outside Singapore. Of its business, as of the last quarter, almost 25 per cent of the group’s revenues did not come from the telecoms side. Instead, it came from ICT and digital operations. Lang said the company wants to increase this proportion to 40 to 50 per cent over the next three to five years.