Circles.Life enters first overseas market

Singapore

TELCO startup Circles.Life must launch in new markets at the right pace, despite ambitious global plans, co-founder Abhishek Gupta has said.

Circles.Life - which hit its first overseas market with an official launch in Taiwan on Monday - is gunning for a third-quarter debut in Australia, and in Indonesia by year-end.

This was even as Mr Gupta confirmed that it will not be a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in Indonesia, where it now has "a huge team" of more than 50 staff members.

Circles.Life, which has leased network here from M1 since 2016, has adopted the same MVNO model with an undisclosed Taiwanese partner.

It also plans to enter at least two more markets next year, although these have not been chosen. The company is weighing suitors in the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and North America, although Mr Gupta added that "we have to be very careful in terms of management, bandwidth, in terms of understanding consumers".

"The idea is to make sure the great customer experience that we created in Singapore also gets captured in the other markets," he continued. "And the best way to do that is to make sure you launch at the right pace."

Yet sometimes that right pace involves switching tacks - which Circles.Life will have to do in Indonesia, where it has been unable to offer services on frequency leased from a network operator, as it will do elsewhere.

Asean's biggest market is "very regulation-driven", Mr Gupta told The Business Times: "There's a challenge with the regulations not allowing MVNOs."

Instead, Circles.Life will handle the platform, operations and marketing for an unspecified network partner, he said: "What we can do is, with someone else who has the licence to launch their services as a telco, we can help support them launch a service of their own, which can deliver the same outputs to customers."

Circles.Life targets what Mr Gupta dubbed "a segment that likes to spend", which he said has similar preferences worldwide - such as contract-free plans, data usage transparency, and cross-selling with digital lifestyle products like Amazon subscriptions.

But, despite the expansion, Mr Gupta said that the Singapore market will remain critical to Circles.Life.

He noted that, based on the differences in average revenue per user in Singapore and in markets like Indonesia, customers here are worth much more than overseas counterparts.

Customers and firms also have more access to credit cards and bank accounts, added Mr Gupta, calling Singapore a "very lucrative market".

After a Series C round in February, led by venture giant Sequoia Capital India, Circles.Life said it would spend more than S$250 million to move into at least five markets by end-2020.

State-linked EDB Investments Pte Ltd, the investment arm of Singapore's Economic Development Board, was also named as an investor in a funding round announced in June.