The most excellent German blog Mobile Zeitgeist alerted me (in German) to a little battle that illustrates the pitfalls of creating the seamless user experience: Nokia appears to being in a tussle with (at least) the German arms of Vodafone and T-Mobile over the pre-installation of Skype clients on some of its forthcoming handset models (including the long-awaited iPhone competitor, N97).
Tag: ARPU
Here’s an interesting one: we will soon all be Cupertino-loving black turle-neck fashionistas whilst going on about our cold-nosed business. This is at least what this article ponders (following Apple’s announcement to add “business features”; could it really get push-e-mail?) .
The article has some interesting facts to offer: user satisfaction for Apple‘s iPhone is dramatically better than for anyone else (a distant first at 59% “very satisfied” users). And, somewhat noteworthy, the Blackberry had a drop of 8% in “very satisfied” users (47%) according to a recent survey — the first decline in its history. Nokia follows with 40% with the others behind.
Apple has only 5% of the smartphone market but, given it is only out on one carrier per country and only launched some 9 months ago, that is rather honourable. And user satisfaction is absolute key to business phones though: price is, for corporate IT buyers, less an issue than for the consumer. And no IT manager thrives on the thought of a mad manager breathing down their necks over an IT or phone glitch. So user satisfaction might in fact be an important lever to push it higher in the business smartphone sector, which is a sweet one with very high ARPU. The article concludes that there is “anecdotal evidence that Apple’s market share is growing. FTN Midwest analyst Bill Fearnley Jr. said that according to his checks, iPhone sales were helped in February by the introduction of a corporate iPhone plan that allows AT&T to bill employers directly.”
So an interesting battle at hand. It is also interesting (and may send shivers down open-source spines) as the two leaders in user satisfaction both run on rather contained software ecosystems. But it does show that it helps when things indeed work (comparatively) seamlessly and painlessly on a device.
I am yearning to see Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel in black turtlenecks wielding an iPhone (Sarko and Obama [do I even need a link for him?] are a given of course). Oh brave new world…
I mean, it’s nothing new as us mobilists knew it all along but now, alas, someone put their finger in the air and quantified it. So here goes: as early as next year, wireless phone users will outnumber landline users by 3 to 1. Impressive, huh?
Some more somewhat obvious findings are: rich nations are running out of non-users, and in some emerging markets, where rising personal incomes have made wireless affordable, that gap closes quickly, too. Even so, only half the world’s population uses mobile phones now. Most subscriber growth over the next five years will quite naturally come from India, China, parts of Asia, and Africa. I think the author might have forgotten Brazil…
And now, dear content lovers, comes the candy: the analysts say that “[f]irms must boost their average monthly revenue per user, or ARPU. Text-messaging has been the biggest moneymaker, along with ring tones and games. Music and video downloads are starting to catch on”. By 2011, U.S. carriers will garner 35% of service revenue from data products, more than twice the 2007 share, says the Telecommunications Industry Association.
But in emerging markets, non-voice services are growing, too: “Wireless companies need to evolve their business models because of the changing nature of the industry, not just penetration levels,” said Sureyya Ciliv, chief executive of Turkcell. “Communication and information technologies are converging globally.
Now, this should be welcome news to the mobile content folks: more than $30 ARPU on data consumption vs the industry average $6.74 (which is what IDC reported), and more than half of that are from content (more than double the industry average).
These are the figures MVNO Amp’d has released. Some juicy mobile content stuff in there:
– 5% of original content sees 30% of all downloads.
– The niche lives: ultimate fighting and super-cross see a lot of traction.
– Amp’d subscribers download more full music tracks than ringtones (which nicely confirms my explanation of that trend set out a few days ago here).
Congrats!