Minister for Public Investment and State Enterprise, William Duma, says there wont be any further State Owned Entity mergers until the current amalgamations are completed and reviewed.
The Minister said the current mergers that took place in 2018 have not been completed.
Duma said the current mergers between the water utilities companies and telecommunications businesses are still on going.
Once completed their operation will give the government an idea on the idea of mergers.
“As you know the Government has decided to merge our two water utility companies, Eda Ranu and Water PNG and our Telcos DataCo, Telikom and BeMobile, and we have not completed the merger process yet. So we’d rather see how they operate as merged entities and see how they measure up to the standards that we expect of them before we look at other things,” said Duma.
Meanwhile Duma said there was a lot of improvement to be made in the performance of SOE’s.
During his meeting with SOE Head, he called for a change in culture.
However he expects an improvement in 2019.
“When we started last year , there was a lot left to be desired. But as the year progressed, there was improvement in nearly most of our SOE’s. So we are expecting better results by the end of this year,” Duma said.