[Satellite Today Web Exclusive – 6-11-08] While SES divested its interest in AsiaSat in 2007, it is still intent in playing a major role in the region, the global operator still looks at Asia as a key market.
Robert Bednarek, CEO, SES New Skies talks about the opportunities for SES in the region and how the company hopes to make a strong impact in the market.
Via Satellite: What are the demands for satellite capacity in Asia?
Bednarek: Asia is actually made up of many different markets, but we have a tendency from a satellite perspective to refer to Asia as this one huge geographical region. There are lots of different markets within the region. Depending on where you look, you do see strong demand, which is also application-specific. The Southeast Asia market is showing signs of being quite interested in a variety of small DTH (direct-to-home) bouquets, growing data traffic and GSM backhaul traffic. There is demand there. If you look at Northeast Asia, and in particular Korea, we see strong demand for enterprise and data communications. Throughout the Pacific region, there is a need for trunking capacity, Internet capacity and fiber restoration capacity. The effects of the tsunami there a couple of years ago are still being felt. The general trend is positive with needs for increasing amounts of capacity. The applications are pretty diverse and there are certainly pockets of strength within certain regions.
Via Satellite: How does SES meet these needs following the AsiaSat divestiture?
Bednarek: There are a couple of elements to that, and this happened prior to divestiture of AsiaSat. It really began with the acquisition of New Skies. As you know, while our core markets were Europe and America, we had participated in Asia and South America through minority participations in AsiaSat and StarOne. We felt those regions offered lots of growth opportunities within diverse geographies. We were frustrated by the fact that we could only participate on a minority basis in the shareholding in AsiaSat. The minority shareholding prevented us from doing a variety of things, including the broadest possible synergies with the rest of SES, on procurement, fleet planning, optimizing capacity. etc. When New Skies came along, we thought this would be a good way of increasing our presence in the market. New Skies was highly complementary to AsiaSat fleetwise, and we thought the two would actually fit together nicely, but converting on this proved difficult. At the same time, it became evident that there was some external interest in our minority shareholdings.
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