Research Notes

John Strand’s MVNO Presentation

at GSM World Congress 2005

Every year most of the mobile industry meets at the GSM World Congress and once again this year, John Strand was one of the speakers at the conference. John Strand’s topic was “Evaluating the impact of MVNO & Discount Providers on Price and Value Strategies” and his presentation was based on the second edition of his companies report  “The Moment of Truth – a portrait of the Discount MVNO/Mobile Operators’ success“- a report that has today been sold to over 80 mobile operators world wide and most of the worlds largest MVNO’s.

You will be a little amazed over the fact that it was prepared over 10 months ago and the actual presentation you just heard was given in Cannes in February 2005. Now spend two minutes thinking about just how much that John Strand talked about, has actually happened on the market for discount/No Frill mobile products since then!

Just to put it a little into perspective, it has not just been MVNO’s like easyMobile, Saunalahti, Debitel Denmark, Telmore, CBB, Talkmore etc. that have launched their own discount/No Frill concepts, but also operators like One in Austria, E-Plus in Germany, Tele2 in Sweden, Sunrise in Switzerland, Proximus in Belgium and many other operators that- since that presentation in February – have already launched or will launch their own discount/No Frill concepts

The result of these concepts can be divided into two elements, a price element and a traffic element. Looking across Europe it is especially the prepaid customers that are seeing that these new concepts are giving them an opportunity to achieve sizeable savings. These price reductions are exactly what many operators were afraid would happen when they heard about the past years developments on the Danish mobile market.  If you look at this development that has hit both Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, you can see that the different discount concepts have not only resulted in a large drop in prices, but also a huge growth in the volume of voice and SMS traffic – a growth that on an annual basis has been around 20%. In other words the falling prices are having a very positive effect on network traffic and stimulating the migration from fixed line subscribers to mobile subscribers.

Strand Consult believes that the web based discount concepts have come to stay and that discount concepts similar to those originally launched by CBB and Telmore in Denmark back in October/November 2000 will be available in all European countries by the end of 2005. We also believe that they will have spread across the rest of the world already by the end of 2006. We are extremely pleased that the market once again has evolved as we had predicted it would almost a year ago and as you can hear for yourself, has followed the path laid out in John Strand’s presentation from last February at the GSM World Congress in Cannes.

Please do listen to the presentation. You can read more about our workshops about the discount mobile providers and how the market is evolving by clicking here: Workshops

A look back at the GSM World Congress
GSM World Congress 2005
Strand Consult Predictions for 2005

The Moment of Truth – A portrait of the Discount MVNO / Mobile Operators’ success

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