Allen Lew, CEO,  Singapore, Singtel, Chua Sock Koong, CEO, Singtel Group, and Zeinal Bava, CEO, PT

December 13th celebrates the start of the partnership between Portugal Telecom and Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel) when both companies signed a collaboration agreement to share operational and commercial best practices in fibre optic and IPTV based pay-TV services and to develop innovative applications for for ultra high speed fixed and wireless networks.

Promoting excellence in multimedia and innovation, PT and SingTel will share their know-how in areas such as IPTV and FTTH as well as the mobile and business markets. PT was selected to be SingTel’s partner after a global search.

This agreement includes:

• Sharing benchmarks and best practices particularly in operating fibre optic based fixed line networks;
• Collaboration on research and development including joint creation of cross platform applications and solutions;
• Leveraging joint scale and assets in wholesale procurement leading to potential cost savings;
• Fostering talent pools across the companies including employee secondment programs.

Zeinal Bava, CEO, PT said: “We are witnessing a profound transformation of our business model, at an accelerated pace. At Portugal Telecom, we have been striving to lead this transformation in our markets, through a drive to achieve excellence based on a focus on innovation, execution and internationalisation. It is with great enthusiasm we partner with a leading player such as SingTel to share best practices and to collaborate on rolling out increasingly more advanced services and to continue to improve time to market, whilst increasing also our efficiency.”

Allen Lew, CEO Singapore, SingTel said: “Collaborating with an experienced integrated telecom service provider like PT will bring benefits to our customers by allowing us to gain more experience in fibre, benchmark our costs and improve our processes so that we can be more effective in meeting our customers’ needs.  SingTel is excited to be dreaming big with PT and are confident this agreement will ensure we are both able to create distinctive capabilities in our respective markets.”

Portugal Telecom has a long history of providing pay-TV services in the Portuguese market and for the past three years has been providing pay-TV services (under the MEO brand) using its copper and fibre networks. PT today has 1 million homes passed with fibre (FTTH) and has already announced that it will build an additional 600,000 FTTH homes in 2011.  Over the past three years, PT has gained roughly 30 per cent market share in pay-TV in Portugal and has more than 800,000 pay-TV customers.  PT is also the leader in mobile in Portugal, where it has been driving wireless broadband and smartphone usage,

Allen Lew, CEO  Singapore, Singtel, and Zeinal Bava, CEO, PT

This year in Singapore, SingTel launched fibre services to residential customers, delivering 100 Mbps speeds to homes and is progressively upgrading mobile network capacity to 42 Mbps.  The company’s multimedia efforts are gaining traction with 245,000 customers on its three year old pay-TV service, mio TV.  In the business segment, SingTel is a leader in regional IP VPN service and has more than 100,000 users on its cloud-based services.  With its significant presence in Asia and Africa, the SingTel group reaches 368 million mobile customers and leverages this scale to drive service innovation and enhance customer experience.

About SingTel
SingTel is Asia's leading communications group providing a portfolio of services including voice and data solutions over fixed, wireless and Internet platforms as well as infocomm technology and pay TV. The Group has presence in Asia and Africa reaching more than 368 million mobile customers in 25 countries.