This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on December 17, 2015.

PETALING JAYA: Sedania Innovator Bhd, the recently listed mobile phone platform developer and service enabler, has introduced the ShareShare OTT application, an over-the-top extension of its airtime transfer (ATT) service, to tap the mobile data market.

Sedania executive director Firoz Mohd Noor told reporters yesterday the mobile application’s launch was timely to adapt to the growing consumption of mobile data.

“SMS (short messaging system) is still relevant — even in Malaysia. But data usage has become more relevant today than it was [at] this time last year,” he said.

Almost all of Sedania’s earnings came from its ATT business, where it provides services to telecommunications companies to allow its prepaid customers to pass their prepaid credit to another user of the same network via SMS.

The ShareShare OTT, on the other hand, allows prepaid mobile subscribers from various networks to top up, transfer and request airtime credit via Sedania’s proprietary ShareShare credit “Heartz” to users of other network providers.

The introduction of the service is also timely for Sedania to combat the slowdown in consumption in Malaysia. Firoz said since the goods and services tax (GST) was introduced in April, there had been a drop in customer transactions.

Nowadays, Firoz said, the average daily transactions came to 266,000, compared with some 324,000 transactions before the GST regime.

“But we expect that consumption will rebound next year, when people are getting used to prices after the GST,” he added.

Turnover for the nine-month period ended Sept 30, 2015 (9MFY15) for Sedania’s Malaysian operations dropped by 12% to RM5.1 million.

Its other markets include Indonesia and Bangladesh, where it provides ATT services to Axiata Group Bhd’s Robi Axiata Ltd. The telecommunications provider has 25 million subscribers, according to its website.

Its Bangladeshi business made up just about a quarter of the group’s 9MFY15 revenue at RM1.86 million, 10.52% higher than 9MFY14’s RM1.68 million.

“Imagine, if our partner (Robi) indeed does the M&A (merger and acquisition) deal, there is a really big captive market that we have,” Firoz said.

News reports said Robi was in talks to merge with Airtel Bangladesh Ltd, a provider with 10 million subscribers, which would make the combined entity the second-biggest telecommunications company in the country.

Sedania, which was listed in June, also declared its first-ever interim dividend yesterday of one sen per share, payable on Feb 29, 2016, as a “gesture of appreciation” to its institutional and retail shareholders, said managing director Datuk Azrin Mohd Noor in a statement.