Optus chief executive Paul O’Sullivan has been given a wider brief as part of a restructure of parent company Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel).
SingTel said on Monday the company would be split into three business units, with Mr O’Sullivan to head the Group Consumer division and be responsible for 400 million mobile customers across Australia, Singapore and elsewhere.
Mr O’Sullivan, who remains as head of Optus as part of the change, said the customers in Australia would benefit from the restructure through improved economics, better sharing of expertise across the group and more rapid rollout of new technologies.
“We see ourselves now being able to leverage scale that is way ahead of anything that is available to our competitors in the market,” Mr O’Sullivan said during a conference call with reporters on Monday.
SingTel group chief executive Chua Sock Koong said the separation of business units into Consumer, Digital Life and ICT was designed to generate new revenue through the development of new applications and content for mobile.
“We must drive new growth,” Ms Chua said from Singapore during the conference call.
“When we started life, we called ourselves a telephone company.
“I think with changing technology and the needs of customers, we see ourselves developing into a key player in the multimedia space.”
The Digital Life unit is to be headed by Allen Lew, who says his focus would be on new digital products designed to “disrupt adjacent industries” such as media, education and financial services.
These products would then be bundled with SingTel’s mobile offerings.
Mr Lew said Digital Life would help advertisers reach out to consumers they want to target through the use, with permission, of personal data such as shopping habits and location.
To that end, SingTel said it had bought US-based Amobee, a premium provider of mobile advertising solutions to operators, publishers and advertisers globally, for $US321 million ($A299.89 million).
SingTel said in a slide presentation Gartner research which estimated mobile advertising revenues would grow to $US20.6 million ($A19.25 million) in 2015, from $US6.8 million ($A6.35 million) in 2012.
Ovum senior analyst Nicole McCormick said the SingTel restructure was a bold but necessary move to take on over-the-top (OTT) mobile players such as Google, YouTube and Skype.
Over-the-top players offer products and services across content, advertising, communications, commerce and device platforms without any affiliation to any mobile network.
“The Group Digital Life unit will need to devise clever bundles and add-ons that take the OTT players head-on,” Ms McCormick said in a research note.
However, Ms McCormick said it would be a challenging task to manage the group across such a large and diverse portfolio.
Meanwhile, the ICT unit covers products for business.
The restructure comes into effect on April 1, 2011.
SingTel, which is listed in both Australia and Singapore, closed steady at $2.33.
