Natcom restates commitments to Haiti

Vietnamese/Haitian state joint venture cellco Natcom has reiterated promises to make internet access available in 46 schools across Haiti, donate 20,000 local phones and donate 5,000 school kits, alongside 400,000 tons of rice, while it also announced that mobile banking services via BlackBerry devices will soon be available on the Natcom network. In a joint press conference with the Vietnamese minister of communications, Haiti’s prime minister Laurent Lamothe also announced that he would be receiving the PM of Vietnam to help strengthen the countries’ cooperation, reports Defend.ht. Natcom has said that it expects to sign up 1.7 million subscribers, and PM Lamothe said that Natcom ‘sells over 700,000 phones per year’. This indicates that the company may have roughly over 1.2 million customers, as it claimed to have comfortably met its target of attracting half a million users by the end of 2011 following its commercial launch in September that year, TeleGeography notes.