Welcome address from FITEL in Taiwan


- Mr. Charlie Wu, President of FITEL -

It's a great pleasure for me to have this opportunity to say a few words in today's meeting. On behalf of my company, I'd like to extend the warmest welcome for you to come to Taiwan and to wish this meeting will be very successful.

As you know, my company started to offer PHS service in the northern Taiwan in June of last year. Within a short period, we acquired more than 320, 000 subscribers. Although this achievement is not a world record, most people in Taiwan wouldn't have thought that we could come this far because of more than 100% GSM penetration rate. With the monthly ARPU (average revenue per user) of around US$20 from our subscribers, we are actually very close to reaching the monthly break-even point. From the very beginning of the PHS deployment, we used "Safe, Value and Advanced" as our promotional slogans. Based on that, we insist that we have to employ the high-powered CS (Cell Station), to adapt the most advanced handset, to provide wireless Internet and data capability, and to serve our customers with super-high standards.

About two months ago, we launched international roaming service to Japan, I am very glad to tell you that the roaming service starts to show promising result. According to my latest information, we generated about NT$ 2 million of additional revenue for our partner, DDI POCKET, Inc. last month. International roaming service is very important to increase PHS's competitiveness with GSM. Recently, we also started to offer VPN (Virtual Private Network) PHS service to the big corporation such as hospitals, semiconductor companies and TFT-LCD companies who need mobile solution within their working premises. I am here to proudly tell you that the VPN service also starts to show great potential.

As our PHS service in Taiwan is doing very nicely, a lot of people including the major GSM operators have started to take another look at us. All this was due to the hard work from everyone of my company, our partners and our vendors. I'd like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to everyone involved.

With the continuous loss of confidence in 3G and the fact that today's PHS services in Japan and Taiwan are already 3G - like, I do think the future of PHS will be very bright and the PHS market should continue to grow. However, there are a few things the PHS community has to do together to make this true. First of all, we have to change the image of PHS, not only to the consumers but also to the government or agencies in some countries. To do that, continuous development of the state-of-the-art terminals and applications will be very important. As you know, we work very closely with our partners and vendors trying to come up with new devices, but we can't do it alone. It really requires the PHS MoU Group as a whole to devote in this area. I am very happy to know that the MoU is putting an international "Operators (Carriers) Committee" to work together on the common issues of PHS service provisioning. I sincerely hope that through the committee we can bring PHS to the next level. Speaking of bringing PHS to the next level, one of the key points, I think, is to provide a GSM/PHS dual mode handset as soon as possible. Once we shall share the latest status with you, we can make more significant progress. Other than the PS (Personal Station), we also require the PHS community to come up with newer ideas and solutions, such as the newest chip set or module, so our manufacturing partners can continue to produce the quality products for our services.

Lastly, I'd like to thank PHS MoU Group for bringing the annual meeting to Taipei. I think this gathering provides the strongest support for us and will bring more creative thinking to PHS business. I wish you all have a very pleasant stay in Taipei.