TORONTO – Despite being about two months away from launching its network, new wireless entrant Public Mobile opened the doors to 25 stores in Toronto and Montreal Thursday to start pre-selling four handsets and promoting its $40 unlimited talk and text packages.
Company CEO Alek Krstajic said that the network will launch by mid-May in Toronto and Montreal, and will double its territory, and quadruple its number of stores, by the end of the year. Public Mobile paid $52.3 million for G-band spectrum spanning the corridor from Windsor to Quebec City, an area that includes nearly 19 million Canadians.
The idea to attract “pioneer customers” was borrowed from Ted Rogers, admits Krstajic, who worked at Rogers when that company was getting into the wireless business. Krstajic was also an executive with Bell, including president of their wireless business five years ago.
All of which helped bring him to today, he said with a grin from behind a podium adorned with the word ‘unlimited’, which is also featured prominently in the company’s straight-forward marketing campaign.
“What we’re trying to do is be a different kind of wireless provider,” he said during the launch announcement at a one of the company’s 15 Toronto-based stores. “We’re not going head-to-head with those folks (the incumbents). We’re trying to serve the unserved market.”
According to Krstajic, that market is the approximately 30% of the Canadian population who do not currently have a wireless phone either because they haven’t been able to afford one, or haven’t found a provider that offers the “predictability” of paying the same amount every month like Public will. Much of this market is working class and ethnic Canadians, Krstajic continued, and the company’s stores and advertising will be concentrated in the neighbourhoods where this demographic “lives, works and plays.”
Public Mobile will launch with the ZTE C78 priced at $70, Kyocera Tomo for $110, the Samsung R312 priced at $125, and the Kyocera G2G0 for $180, without contracts or credit checks. Krstajic said that the company is finalizing roaming agreements now, but will not offer roaming – or smart phones for that matter – at launch. But he also hinted that the company’s offering could evolve with its customers’ needs.
“We aren’t going to limit ourselves, we want to be unlimited in every sense,” Krstajic said. “That having been said, the strategy is very clearly we want to make sure that we walk before we run, we want to make sure that in everything we offer, we offer predictability. And so, if I’m going to offer smart phones with data, I’m going to want to do it on a flat rate basis, not on an incremental basis.”
Public Mobile’s has outsourced its call centre to a location in Belleville, ON, and its 100 corporate staff are split between offices in Toronto and Montreal.
When pressed about the company’s customer targets and plans for expansion, Krstajic was short on specifics, saying that he preferred to focus on the pending launch.
“We’re going to be patient for growth, but we’re going to be impatient for profitability,” he said. “That’s the driving force in our company. We’re going to grow, but we’re going to grow methodically.”
