Finally, the hiring of ACCA Karachi head, Rehan Uddin, proved to bring some better results for ACCA poor job market. ACCA Pakistan appointed Rehan Uddin few months ago, who was once an ICAP star student with four Gold Medalists. 

Under Rehan’s leadership, although there has been no significant improvement in ACCA’s job market in Karachi, but things are much better now after he took charge.

After his appointment, ACCA affiliates and students started getting internship opportunities in different multinationals and this time its Telenor Pakistan, a leading telecom giant and the parent company of Mobilink.

According to an email shot (produced and highlighted below) from ACCA Karachi office to Professional level students, Telenor Pakistan is offering internship opportunities for 6 to 8 weeks period. If you’re the one who’s interested to put Telenor on its CV, go ahead:

Telenor Pakistan has the following training opportunities:

Post

Interns

Eligibility

The ideal candidate for job would have the following credentials:

• ACCA Professional Stage Student

Duration

Internships will be offered for tenure of minimum 6 weeks and maximum 8 weeks, commencing from the month of June.

How to apply

a.     Go to www.telenor.com.pk/careers

b.     Click on job opportunities

c.     If the applicant is new, he/she needs to create their profile

d.     Once the profile is completely filled in, click the home page link to go to where the vacancies are displayed – click on ‘summer internship 2012′, which will appear under the header of vacancies, once the document   opens, the candidate needs to click the “apply†button that will appear towards the very end.

Deadline

The deadline for applying is 22 April 2012.

 

Riaz & Co, member of Nexia International’s global network , and a renowned and growing audit firm, gets the audit job of Network Microfinance Bank from Ernst & Young Ford Rhodes Sidat Hyder Chartered Accountants, for year ending 31st December 2012.

According to the notice sent to Karachi Stock  Exchange, Network Microfinance shareholders’, in their Annual General Meeting on 28th of March appoints Riaz and company as their new auditors in place of Sidat Hyder.

This change might be interesting for many investors keeping in mind that it has been rumored that Ufone, a telecom giant, is showing its interest in acquiring Network Microfinance Bank to compete Telenor’s EasyPaisa and Mobilink’s Waseela.

PakistanACCA contacted Network Microfinance Bank, via emails, to know whether the acquisition rumors are true and whether the change of audit firm has anything to do with it but there has been continuous silence from Bank.

With State Bank of Pakistan demoing a constructive regulatory approach for branchless banking, a number of players are now evolving to offer branchless banking in Pakistan as a viable business model, said a report published by CGAP.

CGAP says that Pakistan has become one of the fastest developing markets for branchless banking in the world.

According to report, SBP has issued four branchless banking licenses and is considering several others. Meanwhile government is planning to further encourage the mobile banking by planning to distribute the government payments through branchless banking.

There are currently two major operators in the market with several to jump in during next couple of years.

EasyPaisa, a joint venture of Tameer Microfinance and it’s parent company Telenor, claims to have over half a million mobile accounts. Easypaisa claims to have processed bill payments and domestic money transfers of worth Rs. 43 billion (US$500 million), unveils the report.

UBL Omni, another branchless banking service launched in April 2010, has reportedly won several contracts to disburse payments for nongovernment organizations and government schemes.

UBL claims to have 5,000 agents, countrywide, disbursing payments toaround 2 million recipients.

New players including Mobilink, TCS, Bank Alfalah, Askari Bank and MCB are expected to enter the branchless banking market.

CGAP says that next 12 months will be critical for the newly emerging branchless banking sector in Pakistan. The evolution of the sector will likely yield important lessons for the rest of the world.

You can download the complete report by clicking this link. (PDF File – 120 KB)

According to our friends at ProPakistani, Orascom Telecom has reportedly bought a license for microfinance bank to start offering branchless mobile banking services in Pakistan under the brand name of Mobilink Waseela.

According to the famous tech blog, Mobilink recently completed the buyout of a microfinance license with a price tag of Rs. 1 billion and company has already established a team responsible for financial services. They are now aggressively preparing and testing the service to be launched by year end or earlier.

Telenor first started a similar mobile banking services back in 2009 and now it claims to have carried out over Rs. 10 billion worth of transactions in less than 2 years.

Mobilink is likely to reap from EasyPaisa’s gigantic awareness campaigns for mobile banking that have made consumer understand mobile and branchless banking so well that Mobilink won’t have to start from the scratch.

However, Mobilink will need to innovate the service, with some extra features maybe, to incentivize the customer.

Isn’t it interesting to witness cellular sector taking over Banks in banking sector? where will this lead the power house of banking sector?

Telecom companies are intensively investing on Facebook. They market their products, services, adverts, conduct quizzes and much more through hefty base available on Facebook.

The race is lead by Ufone, which stepped in long before others, thanks to Faisal Qureshi.

Today, Ufone completed a landmark of getting 100,000 fans on Facebook. Unlike other companies, Ufone didn’t advertise much, but like the phenomenon of Facebook fanpages, their fans increased exponentially after initial boom.

“Congratulations everyone! with the continuous support of our customers, Ufone has become the first telecom company in Pakistan to have more than 100,000 Facebook fans. Thank you for your love”, Status Update, Ufone

Indeed an achievement by Ufone.

Following is a list of telecom companies with their links to Facebook fan pages and number of fans with them (as of now).

• Ufone: 100,382 Fans
• TelenorEasyPaisa: 24,154 Fans
• TelenorPK: 14,076 Fans
• Djuice Pakistan: 29,336 Fans
• SimplyMobilinkOfficial: 28,512 Fans
• Zongers: 21,047 Fans
• Warid Glow: 1,138 Fans
• Wi-tribe Pakistan: 5,244 Fans
• Dell Pakistan: 26,379 Fans
• i2Pakistan: 1,115 Fans

No wonder they were worried during the ban of Facebook in Pakistan.

Please help us grow this list if we have missed any fan page!

Reportedly, advertising agencies of Pakistan are busy doing consumer research for their clients to calculate the returns, reported Economic Times.

Paper in its recent report said that Sania’s acceptability ratio is high amongst Pakistani corporations and the young mind.

Back in India Sania successfully branded many products but recent inconsistent form and marriage controversy has depleted her brand value amongst the advertisers in India.

However, this is not going to be the case on this side of border, where companies like Habib cooking oil, Malaysian Palm, Mobilink and Ufone, all have already jumped on congratulatory bandwagon welcoming Sania bhabhi with hoardings.

Of course agencies are going to combat for first appearance advantage of Sania Mirza for their clients, so let’s see who is going to win the chase.

Via ProPakistani

Via Propakistani

Two leading Mobile operators are favoring to impose 10 paisa charges on all text messages sent to other networks, while another two operators opposed the idea – fifth operator remained somewhat neutral, in a high level industry meeting held at PTA headquarters yesterday, told us sources at PTA.

These other-network charges (interconnection charges) can be the death of SMS packages, as currently mobile operators are allowing as many as 500 text messages a day for Rs. 4 to 5, which will become impossible with 10 paisa per SMS charge.

Telenor and Mobilink were of the view that due to their larger customer base, they receive highest number of text messages from other networks.

However, industry sources revealed that actual hindrance is network capacity of these two operators.  A good explanation of this fact is that Ufone is opposing the charges, which has somewhat same size of subscriber base as of Telenor.

SMS facility is widely used and liked by mobile phone subscribers in Pakistan. Some researches consider the low priced SMS as key factor behind the fast growing communication trends in the country. Due to its low price and nature of channel, SMS can’t be replaced by any other mode of communication.

SMS lovers were first threatened by Government Taxes, which were later on withdrawn by Prime Minister, but now the current regime by cellular operators may put all SMS packages on halt.

It merits mentioning here that Telenor has already slashed their SMS packages by limiting the off-net and on-net quota. For instance, if a SMS package allows 1000 SMS in one week, customer can’t send more than 500 off-net or otherwise on-net messages.

As per anticipations, if regulated, other network SMS charges will be widely opposed.

We are told by several Mobilink Franchisers that they have received orders for immediate removal of all “No Samjhota Tag-lined”marketing material.

Unlike usual clearance of marketing material, which Mobilink follows during campaign re-launch or campaign expiry, Franchisers were asked to remove all banners/ brochures and to destroy them.

A Mobilink franchiser while speaking with ProPakistani confirmed that a text message was sent from management asking to remove all marketing material that has “No Samjhota” tag line on it. Furthermore, text message asked to destroy all such banners/posters.

Mobilink has decided not to comment on this situation.

However, an insider at Mobilink linked this move with expected action from PTA against poor quality of service. It merits mentioning here that PTA is due to decided to serve show cause  notice to five cellular companies