awarded two mobile telephony licenses to Telenor Pakistan and Space Telecom on April 24, 2004. The license for Space Telecom was cancelled after it missed a dead line to make a 50% down payment of the offered price. Thereafter PTA offered next highest bid winner company, Warid. The license was bid and acquired through parent company of Warid, Abu Dhabi Group led by the then CEO Mr Bashir Tahir for USD 291 million. On May 23, 2005 Warid commercially started operating. Mr Hamid Farooq is appointed as the CEO of the company. Initially it covered 28 major cities of the country, which is so far the largest coverage in the first phase of roll-out by the first investment of USD 150 million. Within 80 days, Warid secured 1 million customers with 7% market share. In second phase of investment of USD 1 billion, Warid launched operations in other cities of Pakistan. It secured another 3.4 million subscribers with 10% market share. The first anniversary of Warid marked 9.7 million subscribers. In 2007, Singapore Telecommunications bought a 30-per cent stake in Warid for about $758 million. That stake purchase gave Warid an enterprise value of about $2.5 billion. Warid's first CEO Hamid Farooq resigned in November 2007. Mr. Marwan Zawaydeh joined the company as the second CEO. Warid further invested US $1 billion in network expansion by the end of 2009. Warid got a new CEO Mr. Muneer Farooqi in October 2012. SingTel sold back that stake in January 2013 for $150 million and a right to receive 7.5 per cent of the net proceeds from any future sale, public offering, or merger of Warid.
Merger with Mobilink
Warid previously announced its merger with Mobilink in November 2015. The case was under review at Pakistan telecommunication authority. After scrutiny PTA finally approved the merger in July 2016. The companies have become a single brand . This merger also resulted in the sharing of network resources, Warid customers can now connect to Mobilink's 3G network and Mobilink customers to Warid's 4G network, this network roaming between both the operators was enabled in November 2016. In January 2017, Mobilink's CEO, Aamir Ibrahim announced that Warid's journey would come to an end, and that both companies would be launched under a new brand name, called Jazz. Warid customers will also have to replace their SIM cards at all new Jazz Service Centers, where the SIM card will be provided to all Warid customers free of cost. Warid customers are now using the same Jazz network for telecom services in fact the company is still running older Warid packages that are still working but on Mobilink Jazz network.
