Korea's LG Electronics will partner with Cambodia mobile operator Cellcard to expand its smartphone services, LG representative said yesterday.
Customers who buy one of four LG smartphone models will get a free Cellcard sim card with an internet service plan, LG’s Cambodia representative Hor Hab said yesterday.
LG had about 10 per cent of Cambodia’s cell phone market last year, Hor Hab said, making the electronics company number two in the Kingdom’s market after Nokia.
Samsung, which had the third largest market share last year, is also a competitor, he added.
About 30 per cent of cell phone sales in Cambodia are smartphones, Mobitel Operations Manager Kay Lot said yesterday. Cellcard and Mobitel are brands that operate under Royal Group’s CamGSM.
The partnership with LG was a way of getting an edge on the smartphone market, which was increasing rapidly in the Kingdom, Kay Lot said.
“The reason we did it is because smartphones are becoming increasingly more common in Cambodia,” he said.
Sim card giveaways are common in Cambodia.
The promotion has inflated the country’s subscriber figures, experts have said.
While figures obtained by the Post claimed there were more than 13 million mobile phone users in the country, analysts have pointed out that slightly more than 7 million are active users. CamGSM is the second biggest mobile provider by subscriber numbers, according to figures obtained by the Post earlier this year.
The operator had 2.9 million users as of July, according to the data. Metfone, owned by Vietnam’s Viettel, claimed more than 6 million users.
Uncertainty surrounds the firm’s next move. After a buyout of the company by Telekomunikasi Indonesia fell through in early October, CamGSM has remained quiet on whether it was still on the market.
