Sources inform “Globes” that Dai Telecom, a fully owned subsidiary of Polar Investments, is in advanced negotiations with three cellular companies to enter the field of pre-paid calling cards.
In order to handle its business in the pre-paid call market, Dai Telecom founded a subsidiary, and recently appointed a CEO. Dai Telecom VP business development Amitai Bar-Am set up the company’s pre-paid business. Investment in the project is estimated at NIS 20 million, mostly in the first year. Dai Telecom will cooperate in the venture with a company owned by Ido Bergman, who will manage the distribution setup for the project, and will probably own 20% of the subsidiary. The company is expected to begin operating within two months, and Dai Telecom is currently formulating its marketing plan for the brand, to be called Now.
Bank Hapoalim, through the Isracard credit card company, and Lipman Electronic Engineering, which is cooperating with Retalix (Nasdaq: POSI) plan to enter the automatically actived and reactivated pre-paid calling card field shortly. The three concerns are expected to compete with each other, and some of the cellular companies have already issued tenders for automatically reactivated pre-paid calling card machines.
Israel's pre-paid calling card market numbers 1.9 million. Cellcom has 1 million customers, Partner has 525,000 customers and Partner has 350,000 customers. Although the percentage of pre-paid customers among cellular users is relatively high (33%), revenue on the service are low at NIS 1.5 billion.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on January 2, 2003