How to succeed with mobile entertainment in India, Latin America and the Middle East.
The first panel of the afternoon at the MEM conference in London focused on growth markets, including India, Latin America and the Middle East.
Panellists included Neslihan Ucar Cadirci, partner and services manager at Turkcell; Neeraj Roy, CEO of Hungama Mobile; Pavel Roytberg, director of product and service development at MTS; Ron Czerny, CEO of Playphone; and Andrey Kupryakhin of United Fun Traders.
Cadirci kicked off, saying that Turkey is a tough market for mobile entertainment at the moment - Turkcell's revenues fell by 50% last year due to new regulations, introduced after misuse of subscription models by mobile content firms in Turkey.
However, a bright point is the growth of 3G, which has helped the operator's data usage grow by a factor of 18 times. It also has a successful mobile TV business - "Football is a defining success on data usage," she said. "We have a client especially for football."
Roy from Hungama spoke next about what's happening in India and elsewhere. "What we are finding are big drivers is the emergence of very good quality data-capable devices, which are now hitting the market for as low as $40-$50," he said.
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He also talked about the importance of dual-SIM devices, where consumers are switching between operators every month to get the best deals.
Roytberg was next, talking about Russia, where 3G rollout is now finally happening apace, which is driving data usage.
"On the content side, ringback tones are pretty successful, and outside of ringback tones personalisation services are losing their economic appeal. There are still some revenues, but not interesting..."
He said those revenues have been replaced by content revenues - selling music, movies and games.
Roytberg said that iPhone and Android are getting more popular in Russia, but their numbers remain in the hundreds of thousands - there are still a lot of old handsets in use, since the carriers don't tend to subsidise new phones.
Next up was Czerny from Playphone, a US firm which is active in Latin America.
"What we have seen is similar to the market in Turkey - the market exploded, many companies started generating millions of dollars a month, and the governments started taking more control because a lot of illegal practices started to happen," he said.
However, he said that Latin America remains a huge market, with a huge demand for mobile content. "The trends are all positive, the key is to enter the market properly."
Roy talked about the growth of ad-funded models in India, and brands sponsoring free mobile music and other content.
Meanwhile, Kupryakhin talked about UFT's launch of social gaming services as an important innovation. "People who don't have the constant access to their PCs, they still want to be in the game," he said.
The panel also focused on billing mechanisms. Czerny said that premium SMS remains the main mechanism for content billing in Latin America.
"We're five years away from seeing operator billing being a mass-market solution in growth markets," he said. "For now, it's still premium SMS."
Kupryakhin said that in Russia, payment terminals are increasingly popular - they were originally designed for people to top-up their prepay handsets, but can now be used for mobile content payments too.
Roy talked about voice-based blogging, which has become very popular in India through services like Bubbly.
All the panel warned against getting too excited about smartphones in growth markets, since they simply don't have a large penetration yet.
"People depending on app stores in the growth markets are suffering," said Roytberg. "It just isn't viable right now."
