KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 11): Maxis Bhd wants to be a price maker in the telco sector, and not a price taker as is commonly perceived of cellular network service providers.

Maxis chief executive officer Robert Nason pointed out the group was the first to reduce broadband prices in line with the Government’s push for lower prices for higher network speed, before the rest of the market followed suit.

“Maxis was the first to market with the new prices, so we’re leading the market and the price reductions. There’s no mandated retail price out there and there’s no one telling us what the price should be. Maxis has set the price. The rest of the market is subsequently following,” he said in a statement today.

“We acknowledge that we’ve been relatively passive in this area in the past but we’re not anymore. We have ambitions to get more speeds, to have new offerings and we will be a market leader in this space, taking advantage of the new provisions that are available.”

Nason also pointed out that Maxis is the only network access seeker in the fixed broadband market.

“In terms of the new changes that have been introduced, we’ve essentially got two access providers which is TM (Telekom Malaysia Bhd) and TIME (Time dotCom Bhd), and one access seeker which is Maxis — there is no one else in the market. There has been some miscommunication about this.

“Maxis has been in this broadband market for some time as an access seeker, and plans to seek access from every access provider in the market. So our ambition is to be able to go to any customer and say ‘we will find fibre broadband that’s near you and we will connect you up from wherever that might be, including our own fibre’, we’re the only ones doing that,” he observed.

Nason said the group is taking proactive steps to rollout new pricing and network speeds that were effective from Sep 13 to its entire customer base, but stressed this would take some time to implement considering it has 200,000 customers.

The move would also require new routers for higher speeds.

“We also have investments in our network to do the interface, to make sure the new speeds work and that takes time,” he explained. “To be clear, we did not know whether the MSAP (Mandatory Standard on Access Pricing) was coming or not. It was rolled out in January, which was when the new announcements were made by the regulator. We had a five-month period with the old government when we didn’t know if that was happening or not.

“So it was only in August where we were able to secure agreements that this was going to take place. Within two weeks of having that agreement, we announced our pricing, in record time for any operator in any market,” he said.

After the announcement of its new pricing, Nason said Maxis had 40,000 requests to take advantage of these new prices from the market, and had hired an additional 100 staff.

“We’ve been overwhelmed with the response we’ve received, so the market is working. It’s a very difficult adjustment that we all are making, but the big beneficiary is the customers out there and over time, this will be a great boon for Malaysia,” he added.

Maxis fell 12 sen or 2.15% to RM5.45 today, giving it a market capitalisation of RM42.6 billion.