SmarTone to offer more data usage plans

It's likely to exceed 6GB per subscriber.

According to Maybank Kim Eng, Hutchison Telecom HK-3HK (SmarTone’s peer) recently introduced new 10GB/20GB data plans for monthly charges of HKD498/598 to heavy mobile data subscribers (previously, they only offered a HKD398 6GB-capped unlimited data plan). 

With this, Maybank expectsSmarTone to follow suit soon. SmarTone’s average monthly mobile data usage per subscriber has been doubling every year and reached 2GB-3GB in FY12 from <500MB in FY10.

Here's more:

Given that 4G smartphones and the new applications (i.e. mobile cloud storage and sharing services, mobile surveillance systems) consume more data, we expect monthly mobile data usage per subscriber to exceed 6GB soon.

Therefore, we expect the new higher-tier data plan will monetize SmarTone’s high-end mobile subscribers.

New competitors unlikely to be a threat. China Mobile (CM) and China Unicom (CU) recently expanded their mobile service businesses in Hong Kong.

As spectrum resource in Hong Kong is limited and the existing mobile service providers have well established the network infrastructure, we believe that it will take CM and CU 3-5 years and billions of capex dollars on infrastructure development in order to catch up the infrastructure size of their peers.

Therefore, we remain confident on SmarTone’s market share in Hong Kong, especially in the mid- and high-end segments.