Newcall communicates with Asia

By ADAM GIFFORD

Stephan Goodburn, director of sales and marketing for listed telecommunications company Newcall Communications, has been appointed chief executive of its new Singapore operation.

Mr Goodburn will fill both roles until a replacement is found and should be in Singapore full-time by September.

Newcall has secured licences to offer full services in that country's deregulated telecommunications environment and has signed interconnect agreements with the two major carriers delivering local access, Singtel and Starhub.

It intends to repeat the model of providing telephony services to small and medium-sized businesses it developed in this country.

"We are the largest purely service-based operator up there," Mr Goodburn says. Staff numbers, he adds, should be up to 35 by the end of the year.

The company has been selling phone cards since it launched a couple of months ago, targeting the million foreign workers from Malaysia, Philippines and other Asian countries who fill many of the service and construction jobs in the city state.

Mr Goodburn says more than 45,000 cards have been sold already in $10, $20 and $50 denominations, and the card switch is running at 85 per cent capacity.

He says Newcall subsidiary Iprolink is developing a business-to-business e-commerce solution which will be rolled out in Singapore in September, before it is introduced here.