A few days ago Naguib Sawiris, Chairman of Orascom and WIND Mobile financial backer, said that both Mobilicity and Public Mobile are “dead on arrival” and they will inevitably be acquired by WIND.
It seems Public is standing their ground that this will not happen. In an interview Bruce Kirby, Public Mobile VP of strategy and business development, said “We can see ourselves as being the ones consolidating… We would much rather build up a business and demonstrate that we can serve this segment of customers effectively and efficiently, rather than sell out quickly… No one has made any formal offers, I am pretty sure to anybody.”
Public Mobile invested $53 million during the recent Spectrum auction and has the possibility of reaching 19 million customers from Windsor to Quebec City. They are backed by a $50 million investment from OMERS and in June announced a whopping $350 financing deal with ZTE Corporation and the Export-Import Bank of China to help them build out their network. In the interview Kirby also stated they’ll be opening locations in Ottawa and Quebec City in early 2011. In addition, confirming plans to go beyond talk and text is to eventually offer data services such as email, IM and picture/video messaging.
On paper it looks like Public Mobile has everything set up correctly: entered into the market with low upfront costs, have millions of dollars given to you by big investors and a decent distribution channel. Unfortunately, there’s been no official word on how many subscribers Public has brought on with their low-cost unlimited talk and text plans.
In 5 years what do you think the Canadian wireless market will look like?
Source: Winnipeg Free Press
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