Does the liberalization matter the mobile telecommunication sector performance and investor? : A case of listed companies across countries

Övrigt konferensbidrag, 2009

This study empirically examines the effect of liberalization on the performance of the mobile phone sector and firms and the role of regulators in East Asian countries which consist of Japan, Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Two hypotheses will be tested: firstly, that the sector performance or mobile teledensity will improve after the liberalization period; secondly, that incumbents’ performance will decrease after the liberalization period. The first hypothesis takes account of the macroeconomic variables, regulatory variables and dummy variable (liberalization). The second hypothesis takes account of the financial ratio in order to investigate whether performance of incumbent listed firms changes after the liberalization. The sample in this study consists of 14 listed incumbents during 1990-2007. The data are collected from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the World Development Indicators Database (WDI), DataStream and companies’ websites. The results show that the macroeconomic variables and regulatory variables have significant positive impacts on mobile teledensity. For the second hypothesis, our results show that liberalization does not affect the profitability of incumbent firms both advanced and developing countries during the study period. But it affects the operational efficiency and financing. Thus, if the regulatory structure is in place and on time, the benefit will be to consumers and the mobile phone sector.