By Jennee Grace U Rubrico

Singaporean broadband provider MyRepublic is raising funds in a bid to consolidate its operations and later tap into new markets, an official of the company said.

Lawrence Chan, company vice president, told B2B in an interview that MyRepublic is looking to enter 50 fibre optic-ready markets around the world, including Brunei, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, China and the Middle East after it consolidates its operations in the four markets it is currently in.

MyRepublic provides internet services through leased fibre-optic networks under countries’ national broadband network programmes and promises to give subscribers 10 times more speed than the ones offered by mainstream telecommunications companies for the same price. It started operations in Singapore, where it rides on the fibre-optic infrastructure laid out by the government to provide faster internet service to constituents, in 2011.

The company, which targets gamers and streamers – the biggest consumers of data – also has operations in Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia.

“Once we consolidate the four countries [that we operate in] and [raise funds], then we go into a new country,” Chan said.

The company is currently in a fundraising exercise and is in talks with investors, he said. It is also looking to conduct an initial public offering in two years’ time, he added.

“There’s so much opportunity in the world, so many countries needing good, fast broadband. We just don’t have the funding to be able to get into that. We have enough for four countries, we just want to go into more. That’s where the IPO and the current round of funding comes in,” Chan said.

He declined to say how much the company aimed to raise from the fundraising exercises. The venue for the planned IPO has yet to be decided, he said.

Chan admitted that raising funds for MyRepublic has not been easy, as its model can be difficult to grasp.

“A lot of people don’t understand our business. If you talk to the guy on the street, he doesn’t understand the telco business, when you talk to a telco guy, he doesn’t understand that the business could be done so cheaply because he is so used to spending so much more in capital investments. They don’t believe it can be done cheaply and effectively,” he says.

“That leads to problems on fundraising. Because our idea is not easily understandable, but is great for the country, we had to convince people on an individual basis,” he adds.

Chan said that this was what pushed the company to be innovative. “When you don’t have the big cheque book behind you, you’re forced to make money. You can’t afford to go too far and try to do too many things. You do things that make money from day one,” he said, claiming that the company is EBITDA-positive, so it posted profits before the deduction of income tax, depreciation and amortisation.

Unlike mainstream telecommunications companies, MyRepublic is not capital intensive because it does not take it upon itself to build the fibre-optic infrastructure it uses to deliver content, Chan explained.

The company also uses in-house software that is easy to migrate and deploy in new markets, allowing it to provide internet service in a new country in as little as two months, he added.

“We wanted to specialise on managing the content coming in and making sure that you get it very fast.”

MyRepublic has no plans of dominating the markets it is in – it only targets a five per cent share of the market of each country it operates in, Chan said.

“We can survive in any place with five per cent of the market because we’re so lean. We sell the same products, we have little manpower, our marketing is the same. We only have two or three products that we sell. We keep it very simple,” he said.

MyRepublic reportedly entered a bid to be Singapore’s fourth telecommunications company last year, after frontrunners SingTel, Starhub and M1, but lost the spectrum auction to TPG Telecom Ltd.

In May, it was reported that the internet provider was seeking a private-equity partner to bid for M1, after the publicly listed telco’s shareholders appointed Morgan Stanley to conduct a strategic review of their stakes in the company.