Mobily completes 3rd year with SR7bn investments

On Sunday, 25 May, 2008, the company celebrated its third anniversary of commercial operations saying that its purchase of Bayanat Al Oula for SR1.5bn would allow the company to expand its growing High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network much faster, and expand the variety of broadband Internet technologies by offering its customer-base connectivity based on WiMAX.

Mobily already reaches its customers with 2.5G technologies like EDGE in areas, where it does not have HSxPA 3.5G mobile coverage.

Revealing some details regarding Mobily's new "Ghataynaha" (Arabic for 'we covered it') campaign, Khalid Omar Al Kaf, chief executive officer of Mobily, said the company now has 5,400 points of sales spread out across the Kingdom, 215 of which were major outlets fitted with the latest technologies. He said the company was still expanding to reach every city, town and village in the Kingdom.

At the level of services, Al Kaf says Mobily continues to maintain its lead and had launched 267 valued added services since it launched, some of which were launched first by Mobily, like multimedia messaging services (MMS), international roaming for prepaid subscribers, ring back tone (RBT) service, as well as a large variety of services.

Mobily's network itself reaches 115 city and governorate in the Kingdom, 70 of which already have HSxPA based coverage.

Al Kaf said that other areas would be covered by the end of the year.

The Mobily chief executive officer further noted that Mobily's network had touched upon areas that had never seen any form of telecommunications service or had limited mobile coverage at best.

He said that in some of these areas, Mobily was still the only operator to offer coverage.

Al Kaf said that Mobily's new campaign "Ghataynaha" was a celebration of the company's network coverage, the reach of its points of sales and variety of products and services available to its customer-base, as well as its lead in events and sponsorship, a prominent example of which was its SR200m deal with the Riyadh-based Al Hilal Club.

Meanwhile, Al Kaf said that Mobily had also invested SR400m in a cable tying the Kingdom to Asia and Europe to bolster its two-thirds share in a SR1bn national fiber optic network.

He said Mobily was also investing SR1bn in its expansion of third generation mobile services across the Kingdom.

Al Kaf thanked Mobily's customers and employees for their efforts in the success of Mobily.