05.03.2009
Mobile industry faces strategic inflection point
Last quarter all four major U.S. wireless carriers reported a drop in growth in net subscriber additions compared to the year-ago period. Are we approaching the saturation level for mobile phones in the United States? Probably not. More likely, the reasons to buy a mobile phone are changing, and the mobile industry is now going through a large-scale transition that will re-shape how carriers, content providers and advertisers make money. There are three causes for this transition: the proliferation of smart phones, an explosion in growth of social networking services and changes in how applications are sold. These forces are converging to create what Intel strategic advisor and former CEO Andy Grove calls a "Strategic Inflection Point." This occurs when changes in the market destroy the old ways of doing business and create new competition. Incumbent businesses are forced to change or die. In the old days, operators made money from voice minutes, and those minutes meant revenue. With smartphones, which support both data and voice, the old model of minutes for money is increasingly at risk. A large number of smartphones today support Skype, which is a free service that lets users make free calls over the Internet. According to Gartner, by the end of 2011 more than one out of three mobile phones will be a smartphone. As the data throughput of smartphones increases, the Internet becomes more important to the functioning of the device. Social networking is one of the largest drivers of Internet usage and that usage is spilling over into the mobile Internet. According to comScore M:Metrics, the number of mobile social networking users is forecast to reach a half billion users by the end of 2011. Smartphones encourage this type of growth.
Roughly one-quarter of the 10,000 applications on the iPhone App Store are free. Moreover, the download ratio of free applications to paid applications is said to be as high as 10 to 1. And for paid applications, the revenue is shared between Apple and the application developer. As is the case with social networking applications, the mobile operator does not get any revenue. This change in the distribution model, from the walled garden where the operator dictated what you could put on your phone to a direct-to-consumer model, is what we have come to expect with personal computers. What does this mean for mobile operators? Voice revenues are at risk, and free applications are driving data usage without generating additional revenue.
Fonte: Mobile Marketer
« back
GS&MD - Gouvêa de Souza