How popular are the new technologies?

Garrison Macri                             Photo: Petr Poliak

NOVELTIES LIKE MMS are finding users among the masses very slowly. Garrison Macri, Eurotel's executive marketing director, claims that what we call modern technologies should include expanded functionality of services that most mobile phone users are already using, like voice services and SMS messages. As far as voice services are concerned, this can involve the supplementation of voice mail boxes with the option of immediate connections with the caller, etc. As opposed to MMS, these services have substantially greater chances of finding users among the masses, as they generally don't require new handsets.
MMS messages, which were first offered over a year ago, still aren't used on a mass scale. Individual operators are able to discover how many handsets that are capable of sending or receiving MMS messages are operational in their networks. That number is estimated at only about 10,000, and usually only a fraction of their owners have MMS activated. For Eurotel this means only 1.5% of its clientele. However, Macri expects that this figure could rise to 10% over the next 18 months. The situation with the other operators is similar. For example, Oskar had about 25,000 users at the beginning of October, which is not even 2% of its customers. Eurotel revealed that an active user sends 33 MMS messages a month and receives 23. With one MMS message costing CZK 9.50, a customer like that is of great interest. Jiří Hájek, T-Mobile's spokesman, expects more widespread use of MMS messages in the near future: "This Christmas will be a turning point. We will come up with an interesting offer of affordable multimedia handsets," he says.
The competition will certainly not remain far behind. The insufficient dissemination of handsets supporting MMS places the greatest limits on its wider use. Operators should take this into account when they launch other modern technologies. "If we want the new services to be used by many clients, they must be as simple as possible," Hájek comments. One of the steps towards this goal is cooperation of operators with handset manufacturers. "[They] used to come to us with already produced handsets and price offers. We now tell them which services we want to provide, and it's up to them to develop suitable handsets for these purposes," explains Hájek.

Corporate market offers prime battlefield

Jiří Hájek                                       Photo: Petr Poliak

While recently a customer was still essentially a customer, there is now a perceptible shift among all the operators, with the greatest turmoil mainly in the corporate client segment. As illustrated in the graph below, the share of Oskar is rising, while the other two, Eurotel and T-Mobile, are focusing primarily on keeping the corporate clients they have. T-Mobile spokesman Jiří Hájek notes that it costs less to keep existing customers than it does to acquire new ones. Small firms justifiably deserve primary attention - because they have only a small number of SIM cards it's much easier for them to change service providers than it is for large companies.
Above all, the two oldest (and for now the largest) operators are beginning to change their offers to corporate clients, trying to adapt them to better meet their needs. Until now only Oskar has created tariffs solely for corporate clients, while such clients must choose from the general offers of the other two (although large clients have been able to arrange customized offers). T-Mobile has just introduced its first purely corporate tariff, whose main enticement is free calls within so-called virtual company networks, or VPNs. These VPNs represent a set of telephone numbers defined by corporate clients - there are usually special rules for calls between these numbers, such as lower prices, etc. Oskar launched this service at almost the same time as T-Mobile did, but the two operators set up their offers in slightly different ways. With T-Mobile a separate tariff is involved, under which all calls within the VPN are free, while Oskar offers this option for a surcharge applied to its basic corporate tariffs.
The great question is what a corporate client really is, because each operator selects the research that makes it look best when presenting its results. According to research by Millward Brown, the research company T-Mobile uses, T-Mobile shows the greatest growth in the segment with six or more employees. Oskar, which consults research from the same company, claims that it controls nearly one third of the segment covering companies with 10-14 SIM cards, which puts it in second place, ahead of T-Mobile. However, research into the entire market shows a clear trend. T-Mobile is maintaining the same, or a just slightly greater share of this steadily growing market, which means more customers in absolute terms. Oskar is growing very quickly in relative and absolute terms alike, mainly to the detriment of Eurotel, whose relative share is declining. Eurotel's number of corporate client SIM cards has remained essentially unchanged over the last two years.

Pre-paid profits

Igor Přerovský                             Photo: Vojtěch Vlk

Each month prepaid customers spend over two billion crowns on services provided by mobile operators. This is a good chunk of money, not only for the operators, but also for firms that provide recharging of prepaid cards. Credit can be recharged from ATMs, Sazka terminals, from current accounts by means of permanent or one-time payment orders, via GSM or on-line banking, with payment cards, via SMS messages, etc. These variants are simpler than the original coupons, and they are also more efficient for the operators, as they can result in considerable savings. According to Jiří Hájek, T-Mobile's spokesman, the importance of alternative channels is also borne out by the fact that they currently represent 60% of all recharges.
Although no official numbers are available, the most successful alternative recharging channel is Sazka terminals, through which, according to those in the know, hundreds of millions of crowns flow to mobile operators each month. A spokeswoman for Sazka refused to make public the exact number - referring to Sazka's contracts with the operators - but she did state that the results far exceed expectations connected with this service. The second most popular recharging channel, ATMs, is not far behind. Komerční banka's spokeswoman, Marie Petrovová, says that each month the bank implements about 100,000 recharging transactions worth CZK 45 million. Helena Matuszná, from the press department of Česká spořitelna, states that in the first eight months of this year CZK 157 million went for recharges in 436,000 transactions at their ATMs (only Eurotel can be recharged there). And finally, the ČSOB ATM network accounts for about CZK 60 million a month in recharging transactions, which is about 2% of the value of all transactions. Recharging via GSM Banking isn't negligible, either. GE Capital Bank handles 100,000 such transactions each month, at an average of CZK 300 each, which comes to CZK 30 million.