Swedish telecoms giant Ericsson said on June 20 that there is still room for further strong growth in mobile phone penetration rates in Southeast Asia. The company, which defined Southeast Asia to include Bangladesh as well, said two-thirds of the region's population still did not own a mobile device of any kind, which means there was pent-up demand for such services.
"In Southeast Asia, including Bangladesh, we are seeing the mobile penetration increasingly growing especially in the low ARPU (acronym for average revenue per user) market at 5.5 million subscribers," said Jan Signell, president for Southeast Asia.
An estimated 66 percent of people in the region are not connected by mobile, he said at a media briefing held at the sidelines of CommunicAsia in Singapore.
ARPU is a widely used term in the telecom industry to measure how successful an operator is in maximising the earnings potential from its subscriber base.
According to Signell, the bulk of the mobile growth in Southeast Asia will come from the lower income segment where the ARPU is five dollars or lower.