YESTERDAY, DiGi.Com Bhd announced a business fibre broadband plan for micro, small- and medium-enterprises (SME) bundled with cellular services.
With competitors Unifi (a unit of Telekom Malaysia Bhd) and Maxis Bhd having already rolled out similar services, AmBank Research did a comparison from a pricing and speed perspectives.
Starting at RM130/month for speeds of up to 100Mbps, the service offered by DiGI allows add-on unlimited post-paid data plans for up to five mobile lines.
For the 300Mbps fibre plan priced at RM188/month, the unlimited mobile data is available for up to 10 mobile lines. The 500Mbps fibre plan at RM248/month offers 10 unlimited mobile lines while the 800Mbps fibre plan at RM318/month offers up to 15 mobile lines.
The 100Mbps and 300Mbps plans only provide 50Mbps upload speeds while the 500Mbps option is limited to uploads at 100Mbps while the highest 800Mbps plan boasts uploads of 200Mbps.
As a comparison, AmBank Research noted that Unifi and Maxis offer business fibre plans at speeds of 100Mbps with a slight RM9/month premium at RM139/month, while the highest 800Mbps plan is RM31/month pricier at RM349/month.
“Also, neither Maxis nor Unifi offers unlimited cellular plans bundled with business fibre at this juncture,” observed analyst Alex Goh.
“However, Maxis has a more affordable RM99/month business fibre plan for speeds up to 30Mbps while Unifi does not offer this cheaper option for businesses.”
Moving forward, AmBank Research reckoned that while DiGi’s new offerings are likely to draw the attention of SMEs, it does not discount that both Maxis and Unifi will offer similar bundling packages for the business community in the near term to defend their market share.
“Also, Maxis’ mobile connectivity is still acknowledged to be better than DiGi’s which started this fibre venture late in the competition (which has already been entrenched by Unifi, Maxis and Time dotcom Bhd).
“Hence, we do not expect this new bundling plan to make any significant change in an increasingly competitive telco landscape,” suggested Goh.
As such, AmBank Research retained its “hold” rating on DiGi with unchanged discounted cash flow-based fair value of RM4.40/share.
At 11.15am, DiGi was up 9 sen or 2.36% at RM3.91 with 443,900 shares traded, thus valuing the company at RM30.4 bil.- Nov 5, 2020
