Our Management World Asia event in Singapore last week threw up a load of interesting topics. Some of the topics that caught my eye included
- 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 advertising was also a big topic, both from Blyk who have a very sophisticated form of customer profile driven advertising, and from Dialog in Sri Lanka,who have a very effective approach to developing advertising opportunities within their existing SMS products. 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 ther 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. This discussion is set to run and run!
Posted
02-01-2010 6:18 AM
by
Martin Creaner