TM extremely confident?

From Bloomberg:

Telekom Malaysia Bhd., the nation’s state-owned fixed-line phone company, jumped the most in 10 months on the Kuala Lumpur stock exchange after saying it will return 3.5 billion ringgit ($955 million) to shareholders.

The stock rose 6.6 percent to 3.56 ringgit at the close, the biggest gain since Telekom split from its mobile-phone unit in April. Investors will receive 98 sen for each share they own.

Telekom is compensating shareholders after spinning off its faster-growing international cellular unit, TM International Bhd. Now faced with slowing growth as it sells fixed-line phone and Web connections at home, the company needs to return excess cash to shareholders or risk losing them in a worldwide slowdown.

As you all know, I made a comment earlier about how Green Packet's WiMax project might overextend itself. As hyped up as WiMax is as an alternative to Telekom's streamyx, I believe it'll be a bit of a bust. At most, it will compete with cellular companies 3g and hsdpa broadband. It's also only a matter of time until the cellular companies here go to LTE which offers wimax bandwidth capability.

Plus wireless broadband is inferior in some cases to landlines in that the connection can be erratic and unreliable. People want landlines for stability. They will not be able to compete with Telekom at all, and I think Telekom knows this. They will be competing for the same piece of the pie that Celcom, Maxis, and Digi are scrounging for.

Besides that, they offer the dual package of phone line plus broadband. In the US, some of the cable providers had very strong competitive advantages when they were able to offer phone+broadband+cable television and whooped the competition. Seeing as how TM is currently working on the HSBB project that will enable it to become a triple play provider, they may prove hard to compete against with in the future. Perhaps even Astro might be in trouble as well. But we are talking much into the future.