GP targets rural areas for growth, signs deal with postal dept today

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Mahmuda Shaolin
The country's largest mobile phone company Grameenphone (GP) will sign a 'landmark' deal with the postal department today (Wednesday) to market its products through more than 8,200 rural post offices, officials said Tuesday.
Under the agreement, the GP will utilise the department's network of more than 8000 rural post offices to sell its SIM cards, flexiload and call services in remote parts of the country.
A GP spokesman said his company beat its competitors to win a tender to use Bangladesh Post Office's massive network in its effort to expand telecom services into the rural areas.
The BPO had floated the tender in July, seeking offers from the country's telecom operators to use its rural post offices as marketing outlets.
"It will help us penetrate rural areas and reach telecom services to some of the remotest corners of the country," the GP official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The GP has around 21 million subscribers, but more than 70 per cent of its clients are based in cities and district towns.
The company's new chief executive officer Anders Jensen had said the company would this year go deep into the countryside as part its new growth strategy.
BPO director general Mobassher ur Rahman hailed the deal a 'landmark' in his department's history, saying tens of thousands of poorly-paid postmen would be directly benefited from the deal.
"We have estimated that each of our 24,000 rural postmen will earn on an average Tk 1500 a month, in addition to their monthly Tk720 honorarium paid by the BPO," Rahman said.
The agreement would be signed today (Wednesday), Rahman said, adding the deal would be win-win for both sides.
"BPO's village postmen will benefit in three ways: they will earn by selling GP's SIM cards, call services and flexiload facilities to users. GP will give them commission on the amount of sales," he said.
As part of the deal, each of the BPO's 8200 will also be named as GP Public Call Office (PCO).
He said the deal comes as a crucial time for the department.
"It will be a saviour for the rural postmen who have been severely affected by price hike of food and commodities," Rahman said, adding the department will also earn Tk 10 million as annual commission.
The deal caps an eventful year for the BPO, which had earlier signed a ground-breaking agreement with global money transfer company, Western Union, under which some 450 post-offices started delivering money transferred by the US company.
The BPO also signed a remittance delivery agreement with two international banks, Standard Chartered and Citibank N.A, and several private commercial banks (PCBs) for delivering remittances.
The BPO --- one of the country's oldest department with over 40,000 employees --- incur losses of around Tk 1.25 billion a year.
Its new chief is desperately searching new business avenues to make the department profitable, as its traditional services have already been poached by private courier operators.