Acision appoints Jorgen Nilsson as new Chief Executive
Acision, a world leader in mobile data, today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Jorgen Nilsson to Chief Executive. In his new role, the former COO will focus on the day to day leadership of the company, driving innovation and capitalising on the growing opportunities in the mobile data market.
As an industry veteran, Nilsson has more than 30 years experience in senior executive roles at leading blue chip companies including Ericsson and Compaq. He will be instrumental in driving Acision forward as it strengthens its position across the mobile data ecosystem.
Nilsson assumes his new position with immediate effect, succeeding Rory Buckley who has stepped down from Acision. Larry Quinn, Chairman at Acision, said, “It gives me great pleasure to announce Jorgen Nilsson’s progression to his new role to head up Acision as it continues to successfully lead the charge in the mobile data market. It was an opportune time to transition Acision’s leadership and Jorgen will now work with the rest of our committed executive team to drive the business to the next level. Jorgen’s passion, industry knowledge, breadth of experience and close senior relationships within the telecom sector will enable us to build on our solid customer base and develop our already strong next generation products portfolio.”
Commenting on his appointment, Jorgen Nilsson said: “Acision has an enviable global customer portfolio and is ideally placed to support our customers in successfully monetising their data services. I am excited to be given the chance to work with such a dedicated group of people to drive leadership, operational excellence and take the company forward to next phase of business relevance. This will provide the foundation to positioning Acision as a world leader in the mobile data.”
Prior to joining Acision as COO, Nilsson worked for over 10 years at Ericsson where his most recent position was Executive Vice President and General Manager of Vodafone’s Global Customer Unit. In this role, Nilsson was responsible for the management of Vodafone Group’s 21 operators, as well as driving economies of scale across Ericsson’s global sales, marketing, technology and operational teams. Nilsson was also previously part of Ericsson Group’s Extended Executive Team.
Telkom Kenya (Orange) to conduct 3G trials
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: In order to enter Kenya’s fast-growing mobile data market, a series of 3G trials will be conducted by Telkom Kenya (Orange) across its mobile network.
The number of customers of the telecom operator rose from 697,000 a year ago to 772,000, this year. The company now intends to build on this growth by investing in the budding data market and 3G presents the opportunity to achieve fast growth. Submarine cable systems like SEACOM and TEAMS, has also boosted network capacity and bandwidth availability, leading to the growth in demand for data services in Kenya.
Telkom’s rival Safaricom was first to roll out 3G services, to obtain a licence in October 2007 and to launch W CDMA-based services in 2008. Safaricom also announced an increase by 93.6% over the year that ended 30 September 2009, with internet representing 17.7% of its revenues.
Zain Kenya followed suit in October 2009 and purchased its own USD25 million 3G concession in preparation for a network rollout.
US Mobile Market consolidation not necessary- Deutsche Telekom CFO
Deutsche Telekom CFO, Timotheus Hoettges told Bloomberg News that he sees no need for further consolidation of the U.S. mobile-phone market.
He mentioned that there are four national players in the U.S. market for 300 million households, whereas in Europe, there are 350 million households with close to 70 operators.
Deutsche Telekom’s current focus in the U.S. is on expanding its 3G network. It is investing $3.5 billion euros in the network in 2009. He said that the mobile data market in the US is booming and they must participate in that now.
On the Issue of 4G networks, there is a possibility that T-mobile could provide funding in exchange for access to ClearWire’s 4G network. Verizon and AT&T are already buliding independent 4G networks.
EMobile to roll-out LTE services in 2010 (Japan)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: EMobile is reportedly planning to roll-out 3.9G LTE services in 2010 and upgrade this to 4G LTE services in 2012. The company rolled-out HSPA+ services in July’09 and provides mobile download speeds of up to 21 Mbps and upload speeds of 5.8 Mbps. The telco has a 26.9% share on the 3G mobile data market in Japan, following to this is Softbank Mobile (33.3%) and NTT Docomo (27%). COO Eric Gan said the company expects to break-even by the end of 2009.
Premium content drives Asia’s mobile
As the growth number of cellular subscribers starts to flatten across the Asia-Pacific region, the mobile communications industry will in future be driven largely by data services, an analyst says.
Frost & Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday that while messaging continues to contribute the bulk of revenues in emerging mobile data markets, much of the growth potential lies in premium content.
In the Asia-Pacific region, messaging accounted for about 39.6 percent of total data revenues last year, excluding revenues shared with third-party content providers. Overall, the mobile data market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17.9 percent between 2005 and 2011, the analyst said.
Janice Chong, industry manager at Frost & Sullivan, noted: “Subscribers in most Asia-Pacific countries have strong preference for local content, which creates the impetus for the fast-growing mobile content market.”
The demand for premium content will also be boosted by an expanding regional subscriber base and better 3G (Third Generation) network coverage, according to Frost & Sullivan. Cheaper advanced multimedia handsets, and the race by mobile providers to secure a continuous stream of content through partnerships will also drive growth of mobile data revenues, the analyst added.
According to Frost & Sullivan, the Asia-Pacific premium content market–spanning 13 countries in the region–raked in revenues worth US$9.4 billion last year. This market is expected to reach US$32.9 billion by the end of 2011.
The research company also noted that in some Asia-Pacific markets, the revenue share ratio skewed in favor of mobile operators, rather than content providers which are also required to pay hefty royalties for applications to music label companies and associations. This has held back the growth of the premium content industry in some countries.
Chong explained: “In markets such as Indonesia and the Philippines, mobile operators typically retain 60 to 70 percent of the revenue from sale of content, while content providers receive the remaining smaller portion.”
She added that content providers in these countries believe they deserve a larger revenue share because they bear the entire cost of content development.
This trend is particularly inherent in markets outside Japan and South Korea, Chong said, mostly due to the popularity of SMS (short messaging service) based applications that contribute to low data traffic usage. As such, operators will tend to seek a higher revenue share from content downloads to compensate for the low data traffic revenue, the analyst said.
Source- http://www.zdnetasia.com
