Over a Billion Smartphones by 2015! Smartphones to overtake PC market by 2012.
The rise in the demand of Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, Samsung’s Bada and Blackberry’s entry into the prepaid segment are some of the factors stimulating smartphone sales, thus overtaking the sale of PCs. The sale of smartphones is expected to jump from approx 190 million in 2009 to over 490 million units by 2012 and touch a billion units by 2015. On the other hand, the PC market will expand to just over 440 million units from the current approx 330 million in the same period.
Smartphones are getting more and more power everyday and with cloud computing, browser based and XMLised content and applications, it is estimated that in 2013, over 60% of the frontline content on the internet like news, email, social networking will be accessed via the mobile first rather than the PC.
This is also being steadily aided by the fact that
- Google’s android platform is taking good shape and is getting wide acceptance from consumers as well as phone manufacturers. The developer community is fast working to create apps for the platform.
- iPhone is improvising and with a huge number of apps and an ecosystem in place, it will flourish further
- Samsung’s Bada is likely to aid this as well
- Internet speeds on the mobile are finally becoming decent!
- More and more publishers are enriching their mobile offerings in a bid to ensure they don’t lose out on the 5th screen.
Telecom Argentina net profit rises 46%
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: 15 percent year-on-year rise in the revenues has been reported by Telecom Argentina generating ARS 12.26 billion in 2009. With 46 percent rise in the net income for the period reached ARS 1.4 billion. The mobile revenues of the company rose 16 percent to ARS 8.06 billion while the fixed-line revenues increased 14 percent to ARS 4.1 billion.
17% improvement in OIBDA has also been noticed which reached ARS 3.9 billion. 1.9 million new customers has been gained by the company in the year 2009 for a total of 14.5 million and out of total, 69 percent are prepaid and 31 percent are postpaid.
Company’s Paraguay unit, Nucleo had 1.8 million customers at the end of the period, down 1 percent from a year earlier. 2 percent increase in the number of lines of the fixed division has been showed which reached up to 4.36 million and the number of ADSL customers rose 17 percent year-on-year to 1.2 million users at end-December.
With 1% rise, ARPU for fixed customers reached ARS 40 in 2009.
France telecom announces new management team
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: A new management committee for French operations has been appointed by France Telecom which will be effective from April 6. Group CEO Stephane Richard and executive vice president and deputy for French operations Delphine Ernotte announced the new organization.
The new organization has been expected to meet the group’s revenue, market share and profit goals in France, implement the new social contract currently under development and strengthen the reliability and quality of its services, products and customer relations.
Technical director Philippe Chicaud, financial control director Bernard Ansart, major projects director Benoit Eymard, and territorial programmes and human resources director Jacque Moulin have kept their current functions.
The new appointees and their functions include- Jerome Barre, the new director of retail sales, Alice Holzman becomes deputy director of retail services, Laurent Kocher will be the director of enterprise sales, Odile Roujol has become the new director of communications; Laurent Benatar becomes information systems director and David Richard takes up the post of director of quality and performance.
Team of eleven territorial directors have also been named by France Telecom out of which nine is for metropolitan France and two for the French departments in the Caribbean and Reunion/Mayotte areas.
Telefonica to develop mobile phone for uncovered areas (Spain)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: A mobile phone enabling users to send SMS and to make and receive voice calls in areas without mobile network coverage is under development by the research and development unit of Telefonica. An application will be installed on the mobile device; which will make the mobile communication possible.
A network will be formed by all mobile phone owners using this application, in which their phones would serve as signal repeaters. Direct wireless data connections will be established by the connectivity application, between two mobile devices that are relatively close to each other.
A network would also be formed by the devices in which two phones that are 100 meters away from each other could share data and voice calls without requiring coverage.
Nine operators qualify for Dutch license auction
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Nine bidders have qualified for the Dutch auction of 2.6GHz radio frequency licenses which will start on 20 April. The applications from potential bidders have been evaluated by the spectrum regulator Agentschap Telecom. The government has already held the trial auction in the month of December and the other will follow before the final bidding.
The government expected to issue the licenses in late May or early June depending upon how long the auction runs. The licenses are available for Wimax or LTE services and are expected to open the way for at least three new service providers on the market.
Out of 190 MHz, 135MHz will be received by the newcomers. A cap of 20 MHz has been subjected upon the existing mobile operators Vodafone Netherlands, KPN and T-Mobile Netherlands. The operator’s existing holdings in the 900, 1800 and 2100 MHz bands have been taken into account, among which Vodafone has the smallest amount.
Unpaired licenses are offered in blocks of 5 MHz while licenses for paired use will be offered in blocks of 2×5 MHz. Out of 25 blocks, 13 are for paired use, 12 are for unpaired use, and 38 licenses are available.
Megafon records 3.7% rise in revenues
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: An increase of 3.7 percent in the revenues has been announced by Russian mobile operator Megafon, earning RUB 181.9 billion for 2009. OIBDA went down to RUB 88.2 billion, decreasing 0.1 percent, and the OIBDA margin dropped to 48.5 percent from 50.5 percent in 2008.
2.2 percent increase in the net profit has also been reported generating RUB 45.3 billion. RUB 33.5 billion in free cash flow last year has been generated and with 4.7 percent increase, the CAPEX closed at RUB 52.5 billion. OIBDA dropped 2.0 percent over the same period to RUB 23.1 billion while the fourth-quarter revenues were up 1.9 percent from the third quarter of 2009 to RUB 48.4 billion and the OIBDA margin fell to 47.7 percent from 49.6.
The number of subscribers increased by 16.3 percent, year-on-year, to reach the total of 50.74 million at the end of 2009. The MOU of the company rose 3.6 percent to 285 while ARPU was down 3.1 percent from Q3 to RUB 316. For 2010, Megafon has declared that it will continue with the expansion of its retail network and 3G services.
Google rivals asked for declarations by FTC (USA)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: A sworn declaration has been seeked by US regulators from Google Inc. competitors and advertisers. The declaration is the part of the regulators probe of the Internet Company’s bid to buy AdMob Inc., indicating the government may challenge the deal.
Google’s proposed purchase of AdMob is under the Federal Trade Commission investigation to find out whether the deal would reduce competition in the market for Internet advertising on mobile phones.
AdMob sells ads that appear on Web pages and applications on mobile phones and the agency is assessing whether the purchase would let Google parlay its dominance in Internet searches on computers to phones.
Declarations are collected by Agency officials when they think there is some significant chance. The court will be asked by the agency to block a merger, or seek to modify a deal.
Google on the other hand has decided to continue the talk with the FTC and provide information. The deal between Google and AdMob will give rise to the largest mobile- advertising company in the USA reigning over 21% of the market in 2009.
According to Thomas Ensign, counsel in the antitrust, competition and trade practice of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP in Washington, it is difficult to envision a scenario where this development, if true, is positive for Google-AdMob but it doesn’t necessarily mean the agency is going to challenge the deal.
Agency’s staff might be persuaded by the negotiation between Google and the FTC that the deal won’t harm competition but at the end of the investigation it’s up to the agency’s commissioners to decide whether to challenge the deal in court.
America Movil plans to buy back share
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: In a move to carry out Latin America’s largest acquisition, telecom operator, America Movil SAB has planned to pay a one-time dividend and buy back more of its stock, thus rewarding investors. The proposal for a payout of 32 centavos a share to shareholders by April 30 has been submitted by the board of the company.
50 billion pesos ($3.96 billion) would be added to the share buyback fund by the plan, which had 7.15 billion pesos remaining as of yesterday.
A debt has been issued by America Movil, to prepare for the cash and stock purchase of Slim’s Telmex Internacional SAB to add home-phone, Internet and TV service in Latin America. The two deals are valued at more than $20 billion. 14.9 billion pesos of bonds was sold by the largest wireless carrier in the region last week in the biggest corporate debt issue in Mexican history.
200 million Swiss francs ($186 million) of five-year bonds is also planned to be sold by the company while 50.4 billion pesos for dividends and buybacks in 2009 has also been paid by the company.
Orange & Barclaycard to launch Contactless Mobile Payments
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Contactless mobile payments will be launched by the end of the year by Barclaycard in conjunction with Orange. The news has been confirmed by Head of Innovation Marketing, Sarah Mansfield in a presentation at a mobile marketing event organized by the Institute of Sales Promotion and Mobile Interactive Group.
According to Sarah, at the back end of 2010, the company will have a commercial launch with Orange for mobile payments and the consumers will be able to buy an NFC-enabled phone and make payments with it. The trail for the mobile payments was first done by Barclaycard in 2008.
SMS alert is also offered besides having an iPhone and Android Augmented Reality application. The application enables users to find their nearest retail outlet that accepts contactless payments, or their nearest ATM.
A joint contactless credit card was launched by Orange and Barclaycard, last month enabling users to make payments of £10 and under using contactless technology.
