| Hear from the Conference Chair |  Last weeks Management World Asia, held in the Singapore Raffles Convention Center, was the second year of this increasingly successful event. In a year of global recession it was encouraging to see that this event grew by ~10% and provided a vibrant place for our members and potential members to learn, discuss and debate, network and do business.
The keynote presentation from Telenor was an eye-opener. Although a Norwegian company, it has over 70million subscribers in Asia and has just launched a new operator in India which could add a huge number of subscribers to this already large presence. What was particularly interesting was the whole area of mobile banking. Telenor have purchased a bank to address the fact that while in many of these countries there is 70% mobile penetration, there is only 7% banking penetration. Their subscribers find themselves using their mobile phone credit to enable trading, and having an in-house bank is a very interesting form of vertical integration. Mobile banking was revisited later in the day by Netcracker who gave an overview of the rapid progress being made in Japan in using near-field technology to enable mobile payment for diverse small purchases such as train tickets and soft drinks.
Mobile advertising was also a big topic at the both the keynote sessions and in the general conference presentations. Blyk presented a great overview of the potential of mobile advertising, specifically based on a very sophisticated form of customer profile driven advertising. Later in the event, Dialog in Sri Lanka, gave a very compelling presentation about how to get mobile advertising going, without any major investment, but rather through leveraging their existing SMS/MMS capabilities. The key for both opportunities was in viewing advertising as content, rather than as an imposition on the person receiving the promotion.
There was also much discussion on the realities of how much bandwidth do consumers really need, versus the economic realities of how much the service providers can afford to provide. The public is becoming more and more enamored of the fixed and mobile internet, and consequently more demanding of their communications connections and devices. But there is an entrenched belief that most of these services should be free to use – bundled as part of a relatively modest fixed or mobile broadband connection fee. On the one hand CSPs have to develop and launch new and innovative services that will delight and retain their own customers and churn customers from their competitors. On the other hand they have to find business models that coax their customers to expand their overall spending on communications services – particularly on the ones that put most strain on the networks. Telstra talked about the current realities of this challenge in the Australian market. This discussion is set to run and run!
Through conferences like Management World Asia, the TM Forum continues to set the standard for the industry, and as management steps more and more into the spotlight, be sure you stay informed by sticking close to the TM Forum. The TM Forum is making a long term commitment to Asia, and our ambitions for this event over the next five years, are to grow it to be as large as our Management World Americas event. We look forward to seeing you next year Management World Asia in 2011.
Martin Creaner
President
TM Forum | |
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