After meeting Vodafone Italy strategy manager... He confirmed
me the impression I had...
There are some bold differences between Vodafone market
forecasts about 3G and the reality of what is happening in Japan.
As far as I know DoCoMo has been able to stabilize the ARPU
by introducing i-mode and evolving it with more advanced content,
services and handset features. This was needed also because
the voice calls price war was impacting in a very serious way.
For the future they will continue to do so (Also with FOMA)
but they will also expand the use of mobile networks in
different contexts with human based use or machine to machine
(From mobile payment to pet tracking).
So looks like is not just a matter of ARPU...
On the opposite Vodafone expects the ARPU doubling by 2010...
So if you spend 150 USD a month today with Vodafone they
expect you will spend 300 USD a month in 2010 (+ inflation).
Maybe this is also due to the high penetration of mobile phones in
EU that is a quite serious problem for business expansion.
In Europe we are already experiencing a slow adoption of MMS
and GPRS data services also thanks to the high costs of these services.
So the ARPU is not really going to double soon...
Is really difficult for me to understand where is the european
secret for this spending increase...
Let's look at the teenagers for example...
If in 2004 western europe will not be two times rich than today.
Next year teenagers, as usual they will be facing a trade off
between different choices.
By 2004 mobile gaming will be probably a great business and
they will be spending some money in buying games for N-Gage
and for the new Sony mobile console and they will see the first
entry-level W-CDMA phones for...
Are we sure that they will drop any other choices to use more
Vodafone services?
What do you think?
Giovanni
Received on Wed Jun 18 17:07:00 2003