Telenor Pakistan

With Telenor Pakistan entering the market, Pakistan now counts

six mobile operators, three of which are currently offering GSM
services. The Pakistani market is predominately pre-paid, with
95% of all customers currently on pre-paid subscription plans.

According to Telenor Pakistan’s licence terms, Telenor Pakistan

shall provide coverage to 70% of Pakistan's population by the
fourth year of operation. Telenor Pakistan is firmly committed to
pursuing an aggressive rollout strategy, which will enable it to
meet the license requirements with a comfortable margin and
ensure superior quality coverage to its customers.

In addition to a clear customer focus, the company expects this

strategy to result in high customer uptake and substantial
revenue growth in the years ahead. Telenor Pakistan also plans
to introduce GPRS and EDGE functionality to ensure that the
demand for more advanced services is met.

On 14 April 2004, Telenor won the bid for a nationwide GSM

licence in Pakistan, which, with its 150 million inhabitants, is the
sixth largest country in the world. On 15 March 2005, commercial
mobile services, with a full multimedia platform, were launched
under the name Telenor Pakistan.

http://www.telenor.com/reports/2004/markets/asia/print.shtml

PAKISTAN
Population (2004, in millions) 1) 153.7
Land Area (sq KM) 1) 796,095
Population per sq KM 1) 193
Population growth (% average 1998–2002) 1) 2.2
Population in Urban areas (2002, % of total) 1) 38.8
GDP per head (US$) 2004 estimate 1) 520
GDP per head (US$ PPP) – 2004 estimate 1) 2,210
Real GDP growth 2004 estimate (%) 1) 6.3
Inflation 2004 estimate (%) 1) 7.4
Telecom revenues (% of total GDP, 2002) 2) 2.4
Mobile revenues (% of total GDP, 2002) 2) 0.5
Fixed line penetration (%), 2003 2) 2.7
Source:
1) EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit)
2) ITU (International Telecom Unit)
Getting from Norway to Pakistan is not easy. You could just call, of course, but it
might be more fun to drive. Telenor, the Oslo-based telecommunications
company, decided to do both in introducing a cellphone service in Pakistan last
week: To promote the occasion, it used a television commercial that looks more
like a sped-up road movie than a typical cellphone spot.
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Telenor is the fifth operator to enter the Pakistani cellphone market, with a sixth
expected to follow soon. One provider, Mobilink, a subsidiary of Orascom
Telecom of Egypt, has dominated, with more than 60 percent of the market.
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To signal a new direction, Telenor decided to emphasize its European roots with
the unusual ad, created by the London office of Leo Burnett, in cooperation with
an affiliate in Islamabad, Manhattan Communications.
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"In a market with five operators, you need to do things differently to stand out,"
Bjorn-Taale Sandberg, chief marketing officer at Telenor Pakistan, said. "We are
trying to position ourselves as the European quality operator."
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Instead of using shots of soccer players or directly promoting the features of its
phones or the technology of its network, Telenor went on a 10-day, 12-country
drive from rural Norway to the mountains of Pakistan, with a few scenic detours.
They filmed through the windshield of their sport utility vehicle, edited it and set it
to music from a British house group, Bentley Rhythm Ace.
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The spot opens in the snowy Scandinavian woods, where a telephone rings. The
motor revs up, the music kicks in, and time-lapse images start rushing by -
Germany, Paris, the Alps, the Italian lakes, Rome, Istanbul, the Bosporus, Dubai
and Karachi.
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Finally, on a dusty road in Pakistan, the driver pulls over, hands a cellphone to a
young man, who answers. A black screen appears, with the words, "Coming from
Europe on March 15" - sometimes in urdu, sometimes in English.
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The campaign started with short teasers, building in length from 10 seconds to
the full two-minute length of the ad as the service opened for business last week.
The spot will run for another week or so, before giving way to product-specific
advertising.
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The production budget for the ad, about $600,000, was five or six times the
typical cost of a television spot in Pakistan, said Elliott Moss, account director for
Telenor at Burnett, a unit of Publicis Groupe. Telenor is expected to spend about
$10 million on media, because the commercial is running on international
channels like BBC World as well as on local television.
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Sandberg said the potential of the Pakistani market justified the cost. With about
8 million users, it is a modest size, but forecasts predict that this will rise to 15
million by the end of the year, out of a population of more than 150 million. That
would represent a penetration of about 10 percent, compared with nearly 100
percent for Telenor's home turf.
.
While Pakistan is a long drive from Oslo, Telenor has experience in Asia, with
subsidiaries or stakes in cellphone companies in Bangladesh, Malaysia and
Thailand.
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Much advertising in Pakistan remains conservative, so Richard Brim, who
worked on the ad at Burnett in London and went along for the ride through
Europe, literally, said he was surprised that Telenor approved it.
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"You close your eyes thinking, 'Am I going to get away with this?"' he said. "Their
brief was, 'Don't make it too young or too modern.' What we did was pretty young
and pretty modern, I think."
.
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TBWA/Germany, part of the Omnicom Group, named Harald Wittig, 41, and
Benjamin Lommel, 34, to head its creative department. Wittig and Lommel have
been chief creative officers at Saatchi & Saatchi Germany, part of Publicis
Groupe.
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Revlon named Kaplan Thaler Group, part of Publicis Groupe, to handle creative
work for its core brand, and chose Carat, part of Aegis, as media buyer for all its
brands, which also include names like Almay and Mitchum.
.
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. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/20/business/ad21.html