NT mulls spinning off profitable firms

National Telecom (NT) is considering spinning off its two profitable firms this year to better streamline their operations and pursue its survival plan.

The company has four major businesses encompassing digital services and solutions, IT, non-telecom services and security, said NT president Col Sanphachai Huvanandana.

Some 20% progress has been made for the spin-off, he said.

NT aims to create the new firms through a partnership model, which may take time and involve a complicated process, Col Sanphachai said.

First, NT has to study and discuss with potential partners the opportunity of joint business development.

Second, the two parties have to appoint advisory companies to evaluate businesses in the future.

Last, the new business model must settle in.

Several alternatives could be adopted, including forming a joint venture, seeking a business in the market that matches NT’s existing business requirements and investing through acquisitions, he said.

“NT has strength in digital services including cloud computing through its operation of the Government Data Centre and Cloud service [GDCC] that can benefit the new firms,” Col Sanphachai said.

The spin-off would support the creation of new profitable firms as part of NT’s survival plan by focusing more on the non-telecom sector.

“The telecom market, especially mobile services, has been saturated by the number of subscribers,” he said.

The move could serve NT’s longterm goal to transform the organisation into a technology company supporting the government to lead Thailand to becoming the digital hub of Asean, he said.

He said the digital services division generated total revenue of 3.9 billion baht in 2022 mainly from digital solutions, internet data centres, cloud services, big data and IT security.

NT also focuses on the key goal of driving digital transformation of the government sector by supporting comprehensive digital services for various government agencies.

For GDCC, NT provides a service with over 36,000 virtual machine servers, which are in strong demand from government agencies.

According to Col Sanphachai, NT’s cloud services include the development of various centralised platform structures for government agencies to expand government digital services and smart services access to citizens such as smart schools, smart tourism and smart health through NT’s infrastructure.

The GDCC has helped government agencies cut digital infrastructure budget by more than 50%.

In terms of information security for customers, Col Sanphachai said NT has partnered with a group of security service providers to support solutions and a security operation centre to support customers with information security systems.