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Singapore Telecommunications Ltd was at the time when the telegraph was still cool. Now, the 139-year-old company is experimenting with video games as a way to raise its profile with millennials.
The telecommunications giant announced yesterday its intention to launch a competitive gaming league this year and will end up sponsoring its own team. ESports may already be very important in markets from the United States to China, but they will be bigger. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates that global sales will reach US $ 3 billion (12.08 billion yuan) annually by 2022, with an audience that rivals the current National Football League audience in the US. United States.
The incursion into the game is the brainchild of Arthur Lang, the former Morgan Stanley banker who took over Singtel's international operations last April, seeking to diversify from traditional businesses where competition is hardening. In 2016, the city's regulators granted a fourth telecom license to compete with TPG Telecom Ltd., and streaming services like Netflix Inc take TV viewers away from Singtel.
"Telecommunication companies around the world are facing some challenges with the changes we are seeing in the digital economy – Singtel and other companies are gearing up to adapt to that," said Rohit Sipahimalani, co-head of the portfolio strategy and risk group of Singapore's state-owned investment company, Temasek Holdings Pte, which holds nearly half of the company.
To rebuild, Singtel has acquired cybersecurity and digital marketing activities, but still accounts for about 76% of its sales from telecom services, with equities losing more than a quarter of their value since their 2015 peak, although They rebounded last week as investors took defensive stock against a backdrop of trade war.
Lang, 46, said he was not playing video games, but In an interview last week at Singtel's head office, he laid out a rationale for the new company.
"It's really an effort to engage our customers," he said. Esports is becoming popular and will draw millennia, which make up most of the region's 600 million subscribers, he said.
Lang started moving shortly after he arrived from real estate developer CapitaLand Ltd, where he was chief financial officer. In November, it signed an agreement that made Singtel the only supplier in Asia to offer the Razer Inc. game smartphone in retail stores.
In March, he announced a plan to connect all of Singtel's mobile wallet services in a single network, so customers could use their phones to make payments in stores across most of South Asia. -East.
"I knew that even after a month of visiting these companies, we had to do something," he said, referring to Singtel's subsidiaries in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and India. "If we want to target the millennial customer, how can we involve them more really talking about new content."
A model for the game plan came from South Korea, where SK Telecom Co uses eSports as a marketing tool For years, it sponsors a team that dominates the game in 19459004 League of Legends a game that has attracted last year 58 million viewers for its global finals.
Singtel begins its gaming campaign by organizing its first eSport Regional Championship in early October at the Suntec Convention Center in Singapore, the event being broadcast on its channels and on its partner platforms. The company plans to sell 3,000 tickets for the three-day tournament.
Players will compete for a prize pool of $ 300,000 (RM1.20mil) and the games will include Dota 2 of Valve Corp Hearthstone of Activision Blizzard Inc. and an international version of Tencent Honor of the Kings of Holdings Ltd. marketed as Arena of Valor . The plan is to add more tournaments each year.
Singtel also announced that he will be recruiting a team to represent Singapore in international competitions, such as the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, where the game will be a medal-winning sport with swimming, football and athletics.
Lang refused to say how much money Singtel had budgeted for the project, but he currently has nine employees working to get the business started.
"Singtel needs to find something other than a pure carrier," said Sachin Mittal, an analyst at DBS Group Holdings Ltd. "I think they're going in the right direction, but the gestation period of these new activities is long." – Bloomberg
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