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March 15th 2010, London
Our quarterly networking event is back once again - save the date!
March 15th 2010, London
Our quarterly networking event is back once again - save the date!
Director Business Development
Competitive Package
UK
It's our way or the highway, Sarin tells rival content providers
Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin says any content providers wishing to launch direct-to-consumer services will always have to work with Vodafone.
Speaking to the FT, Sarin argued that a mobile operator's 'unique gift' for billing secured its against becoming a dumb pipe for other people's data services, particularly those being offered by the likes of Apple, Google, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.
He said: "The simple fact that we have the customer and billing relationship is a hugely powerful thing that nobody can take away from us. Whoever comes into the marketplace is going to have to work through us."
The FT article points out that operators like Vodafone also manage valuable information about their customers, such as location for targeted search services.
However, with more than half of Voda's UK customers of the pre-paid variety there are obviously limits to that kind of data.
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Voda’s myopic assertion that “we have the customer” is flawed with churn levels as high as they are.
Agreed. The writing is on the wall here. Many of the newer D2C content services from the likes of Nokia (eg Music Store) could easily incorporate credit cards, just like iTunes?
What about Visa, paypal and google? Surely they all have plans to take billing away from the operators? If the big internet is just going to transfer to mobile, then surely so will its payment mechanisms.
Hmm... It sounds quite familiar. I think my ISP said that 5 years ago. I wonder where they are now?
Paypal, credit card, pre-pay pin code systems are all in place, check out soem of the D2C mobile platform providers . Its only a matter of time......Of course the operators may try to adopt anti-competitive positions like the US carriers have done and try to ban non-mobile payment platforms but where there's a wall theres a way
By the time Arun gets his head out of the sand on this one the data content market will have passed Vodafone by. The MNOs have been universally **** at pushing data content to their customers......that is why content owners ahve gone D2C. Arun should focus on winning the data battle by offering a £5 "all you can eat" data package. Whether AS likes it or not, data network charges are his route to riches here, not content subscriptions. I am afraid that his content about not being a "dumb pipe" iws about as wrong as it could be.
The biggest challenge to Vodafone would come from Ovi services from Nokia and WiMax. The Service platform would have billing as well from various options discussed above. The phone would have a direct relationship with the consumer. It is better he takes his head out of sands and fights it with real strategies and implementation plans. There are ways to stand up to Nokia.
When operators offer billing at a cost that is closer to the transaction costs of credit cards, then we're talking. But I fear operator billing is just to cost ineffective to ever compete with that,,,,
what he is saying subtly is that there will be further loss in revenues for voda as they move from being a telephony company with VAS to a pipe with billing.
VAS today favours voda in revenue share: 60-70% of revenues
Billing (ie Visa type): 5-6%
See the drop?
With tru BB speeds in wireless (as rollouts of HSPA, Wimax and LTE proceed) and the availability of smart consumer devices such as the iPhone, neither handsets nor connectivity will be bottlenecks for the delivery of web services any longer. This will mean that the wireless environment will begin to resemble the fixed BB environment. Carriers will inevitably lose leverage over content and application providers. They are forced by competitive forces to undermine their own bargaining power.
Carriers have been saying this stuff for years.
Payouts go above 85% with Vodafone's wap billing solution in the UK and the user experience is far superior via mobile than credit card or Paypal mobile. Conversion rates on wap where operator billing is not used are extremely low.
Obviously this guy hasn't come across Google checkout yet. What an idiot.
well,
Imagine iam a sport data provider. The user who wants updates sends an SMS to my shortcode. now my services are charged at 10$ per month. now who deducts the charges from the user and puts it into my account?
In india, its the Mobile Service provider like vodafone who do that. Even if the user is from another network, these guys are responsible for deducting 10$ from the user and putting my share of it into my bank. This way the network cannot be avoided.(all communication is thru SMS, in which the network is involved) Thats the reason the mobile VAS revenue is 70-30 shared. 70 to the network and 30 to the content provider/aggregator. i guess sarin is confused this approch with general data and messed up the speech.
But wrt services on a GPRS/mobile internet they just end up being pipes. They cannot control anything. If they try doing that, its very dangerous and might backfire. So its better they concentrate more on data plans.
All application developers are launching d2c first and then through operators later. Nokia is only on Nokia, Vodafone is only on Vodafone, but when you are d2c you have the potential for 100% of the market.
Vodafone is the biggest pipe, they can't be anything, they can't do anything else,
