As you may have heard on the news, last week we at MyRepublic made the tough decision to exit the IMDA's New Entrant Spectrum Auction when the bidding price climbed to $105 million. We made our final cash-backed bid at $102.5 million.
We want to sincerely thank you for the tremendous support we received throughout our 2-year mobility bid journey. We have read all of your feedback and comments, and we have been honestly overwhelmed by your heartfelt responses.
While the auction result was not the one we hoped for, based on our analysis and our own experience with Singapore's competitive mobile market, paying more for spectrum as a new entrant beyond a point would have driven us to abandon our 4th telco vision — in terms of what services we could offer, how our business would run, and perhaps most importantly, our impact on the Singapore landscape.
In other words, we exited the auction because we believe that MyRepublic can better serve customers in Singapore by taking a different approach. There are several paths to delivering our vision of seamless connectivity between mobile and home broadband – this is what we are now working towards.
We remain committed to the Smart Nation vision and a converged fixed-mobile future. Everything we have done so far – and all that you have contributed – will continue to inform our efforts moving forward.
2017 marks a promising new start. We have plans to launch a number of new products and services for MyRepublic broadband over the next year, and will expand our operations – in Singapore as well as in New Zealand, Indonesia, and most recently Australia.
And while we may expand across the region, Singapore will remain at the heart of all that we do. MyRepublic is proud to be a Singapore-grown company and we want to do all we can to make Singapore the best market for mobile services in the world.
Your support will always be important to us and we thank you for it.
See you in 2017.
Malcolm Rodrigues
MyRepublic CEO