History
Celcom started its operation as STM Cellular Communications in 1988 with Fleet Group and Telekom Malaysia as shareholders. Subsequently Telekom Malaysia sold its 51% shareholding to the TRI group which was controlled by Tajuddin Ramli. Fleet Group's share meanwhile was transferred to the Time Engineering group which was later sold to TRI. In the initial years Celcom experienced a tremendous growth in subcriber base and network coverage under the stewardship of Rosli Man, the President of the company. It was during his tenure that Celcom turned into the leading cellular companies in Malaysia. He left Celcom in 1996.
When the cellular phone market was opened up in 1995, Celcom upgraded to the GSM900 service and quickly grew to become the largest mobile phone company in Malaysia. Competition soon sets in, and several digital mobile telcos compete for market dominance. It was the age of the phenomenal growth of mobile services.
During the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Celcom's owner, Tan Sri Tajudin Ramli suffered a debt crunch, and his shareholding in Celcom was seized by Danaharta, the national asset restructuring company. Failure to resolve his debts resulted in the controlling stake in Celcom being sold to Telekom Malaysia, the government-owned incumbent fixed line operator in 2003. Telekom Malaysia proceeded to merge Celcom with its own mobile-operator subsidiary TMTouch through a reverse takeover of TMTouch.
Celcom was originally listed on the Bursa Malaysia, but after the merger with Telekom Malaysia Berhad, it has since remained private.
Owing to the bad management of its former management Celcom was as found liable by an arbitration panel in Switzerland for infringing an agreement signed with Deutsche Telekom AG’s unit, DeTeAsia in 2002.
The tribunal ruled that Celcom was liable to pay DeTeAsia US$177.2 million in principal plus US$16.2 million in interest as well as other legal and arbitration costs. This works out to a tidy sum of about RM740 million, leaving Telekom to intensify its efforts at recovering monies from Celcom’s previous owners for their misdeed. Only then will TM be able to fully exorcise itself from the haunting of Celcom’s tumultuous past.
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