Mlabs to provide free WiFi in Bangkok – s Chatuchak Market
Mlabs to provide free WiFi in Bangkok's Chatuchak Market
Last updated on ten August two thousand seventeen – 09:56pm
PETALING JAYA: Mlabs Systems Bhd, which has seen active trading in its shares for the past month, has teamed up with Thailand’s Onliner Company Limited for the provision of free WiFi and e-commerce services in Bangkok’s Chatuchak Market.
The Chatuchak Market houses 15,000 shops and is open six days a week. It is known as one of the world’s largest weekend market covering twenty seven acres with some 200,000 visitors each Saturday and Sunday, 30% of whom are foreign visitors.
“The amount that we are originally going to put in (for this project) is up to a maximum of RM800,000. It includes all hardware, software, expertise and later, if we require extra funds, we will look into it,” Mlabs director Professor Sureswaran Ramadass told reporters at the signing ceremony yesterday.
Under the collaboration agreement, Mlabs’ wholly wielded subsidiary Multimedia Research Lab Sdn Bhd (MRL) will provide multimedia movie conferencing and related technology while Onliner will manage the day-to-day operations of the project, its WiFi and e-commerce services and facilities.
Onliner presently holds a five-year concession from the State Railway of Thailand to set up and provide WiFi services in Chatuchak Market. The concession began in November 2016. Presently, the WiFi service is already deployed and operational.
The project will enable the bargaining of pricing for bulk purchases via movie streaming inbetween buyers worldwide and retailers in Chatuchak. Onliner and MRL will also jointly develop the Chatuchak app, which will be launched in January 2018.
Plans are also under way for e-payment or e-wallet for a safer, cashless market place. Expected revenue flows will come from inter-alia movie advertising, numerous gateway advertising and e-commerce services.
“Our platform includes indoor mapping. It is a navigator, like Google maps and Waze. Imagine you are walking into Chatuchak and you don’t know where to go. If you are looking for some product, you can search in the app and it will point you to the shop. The indoor mapping is through WiFi. We have already installed one hundred fifty access points in the area,” said Onliner managing director Shane Suwannaphan.
“This app can do many things including indoor mapping, e-commerce, online shopping, live streaming and live talk. We will most likely invest more than RM1 million on the app itself,” Suwannaphan said. Onliner has invested some RM4 million in total for the entire project to date.
Sureswaran said Mlabs expects a 15% comeback per annum on its investment during the initial two years. There is no time period for the collaboration but he expects to work with Onliner on a long-term basis, up to ten or twenty years.
Established in 2012, Onliner provides total business solutions in offline and online information technology across Thailand and regionally. So far, it has installed similar services at Luang Prabang International Airport and the Wattay International Airport in Vientiane.
Mlabs’ share price rose Three.03% to close at seventeen sen yesterday with 37.63 million shares switching forearms. It was the third most actively traded stock yesterday.
Last month, it was issued an unusual market (UMA) query by Bursa Malaysia when its share price more than tripled from twelve sen on July three to thirty seven sen on July 13, before hitting a record of 46.Five sen on July 14.
In response to the UMA query, Mlabs said the acute rise in share price and trading volume could be due to its collaboration with Singapore’s e-horizon Asia Pte Ltd.