Mr. Raihan Shamsi, Deputy CEO and CFO of Grameen Phone:

From Grameen Phone we are honored and privileged to share the success story. I am really going to share a success story, and the story begins by saying that Grameen Phone is the biggest corporate house registered through BOI and is a joint venture between Norway and Bangladesh. In that sense, it is indeed a success story that we can share in this discussion forum organized by BOI and PRI.
I have taken a few points from the discussion I was hearing since morning, which was very educating for me. The company got the operating license in Q4 1996 and the BOI license in Q1 1997 and launched the business on a very special day on the 26th of March in 1997. We go listed in the stock exchange from 11th of November last year. It's only been 5 months that we have been in that territory. The share holding structure now stands at 45 % held by Bangladeshi and 55% by Telenor, a Norwegian telecom giant. Here is a quick glimpse of the telecom industry, of which 44% of the market share is owned by Grameen Phone, 26% by Orascom Banglalink, 18% by Robi, Citycell 6%, Warid 4%, and Teletalk, the national telephone operator 2%. The telecom penetration in Bangladesh including LAN lines is 54 million which means around 35% including the dual SIM, of which we have more than 23 million customers. A Line operator such as BTCL has got 1% of the market share. I just wanted to compare, when we started and until the end of 2009, in that 12 years, the revolution that has taken place in this country through the telecommunication industry.
At the time when we started, only four Lac people had access to telecommunication. Tele-density was less than half of one point. For the rural people, almost no access to telecommunication, and when it comes to long distance that includes internationally and domestically, it was very expensive. Now more than 5 crore people are using telecommunication and getting the benefit affordably. This has changed lives and infrastructure and also helped the businesses. It employs more than 700, 000 people, and also has the rural area connected through the internet. So 23 million subscribers, if you look at the phenomenal growth, this growth is only for Grameen Phone. Others also have grown since 1997 till 2009, and this speaks about the potentials that this country has.
Someone who comes; he creates a win-win-win situation. The first one is for the company; the other is for the government and third is for the people at large.
The first thing to speak about is the ethics and the compliance we maintain, and we consider this to be an imperative part of our success story. We have a world class network; 90% of the land area is covered by our network which takes excess of telecommunication to 99% of the people, and that includes indoor, outdoor and highway, except for some the hill tracks areas, which is coming up now with the permission of the government. Soon the entire country will be covered. The network that you will find is of the highest quality and world class. The Investments of Taka 15,000 crore, since the company's establishment, consist of the investments made by the foreigners. Around 80% of the profit made by this company has been re-invested for the expansion of this company's network.
The innovation that was one of the key factors that contributed to the success of the company after 12 years, is taking the phones to the rural people. After the second year of operation and three and a half year before the company saw any profit, the company took a commitment to take one phone to one village which means 68000 phones to 68,000 villages. That's how we took connectivity to rural Bangladesh. E.g. Tele-medicine, the health line that we introduced to meet the need of the people; originally this is an expensive and a complex subject if you refer to tele-medicine in Europe, but we made it affordable for the rural people of Bangladesh. You don't have to travel anywhere for more than five minutes to get hold of a phone if you don't have one. And from there 24/7 you can get yourself connected to certified doctors.
Cyber café, if you take this development for example, it looks like this: an air-conditioned environment and lots of PC; it is very expensive but we had to customize this whole idea of cyber world for the people of this country. Grameen Phone community information center have rolled out in every upazila over the last four years. We had little more than 500 CICs which brought internet to the rural Bangladesh. Twelve years back we took the basic communication to the rural Bangladesh, now we are taking the internet to the rural Bangladesh.
One of the many other uses of mobile services is the service by which the utility bills are being paid through mobile phones. There is many more coming. Now we are also sharing the infrastructure we have. This is a good regulation that the government has made that if I have a network and certain infrastructure, and other competition or a new comer wants the space or the capacity, I will have to share mine with them since I have it. India has precisely 35 billion to export each year from its agriculture, internet, call center and the IT sector. Even though this is an area we did not discuss much in the whole morning, we have 160 million people and through some training and skills, we can make this a real asset.
Regarding the disasters, which is a part of lives in Bangladesh, we are taking some arrangement and we have already started it for 6 months on a trial basis in certain parts of the country. In the screen of the mobiles, the people of those areas can see some alerts about the disasters and so forth.
For IT service, we have lately launched a new Grameen Phone IT company and our ambition is to take the IT industry forward together with local entrepreneurs in the IT sector.
We also want to be a green company; we are targeting to reduce the carbon by 20% by 2012, and 40% by 2015, which is quite challenging. The patronization of the national sports, if you talk about cricket, you can't really ignore the brand Grameen Phone. Now we are starting to see the result after investing and working hard on that for the last 4 years.
Coming back to the IPO, the largest that we have, from two shareholders we had 350,000 shareholders overnight in November last year. 45% are local, this is not that healthy though, and 20% of the market capital is with one company, and I repeat of course this is not healthy for a nation. We have 1.2 million applications for our shares. This was an opportunity even for us to reassess how light a brand Grameen Phone is in Bangladesh. You heard from the new clippings, media clippings that, that people would be even proud to have one lot of 200 shares. Among these 350,000 people, a lot of had 200 shares only but still we went for that spirit. We had over 200,000 audiences in the lot in early November. This is a way by which we can brand this country.
I am very much thankful to Dr. Mirza Azizul Islam saying these phenomenal words. The experience of the foreign investors is the most important and I take this opportunity to humbly suggest a point to our honorable BOI chairman because he asked that given the number of challenges that we have where to start. I would humbly suggest that if you can, in the platform of BOI, gather the experience of the existing foreign investors in this country. You can probably start from there, Sir.
Around Tk. 15000 crores of tax is paid to the national exchequer, and this includes our contribution through tax to BTRC and other taxes. For consecutive 4 years, we have been the highest tax-payer; and as high as 5% of the total government revenue in 2008 and 2009 was contributed by us.
The total cost of ownership of mobile phone is on the higher side. We need a lot of support from the government or the regulators to carry forward the development partnership that have been already discussed by the earlier speakers. Just to re-emphasize on that, I want to say that we need to have a rational taxation regime. The SIM tax, which is a barrier to penetration, has to be removed or else we will not be able to provide services esp. mobile phone services, to all the people and hence our whole plan of digital Bangladesh will be hindered.
We are committed to the continuation of the partnership in development, no matter what. This commitment is very important for our company and there are very many ways in which we can work on it; e.g. to get 70% population to be connected and to provide internet services to the rural population.
Thank you very much.