Financial Times - Providing innovative mobile services key to the future

Simply introducing a new mobile service does not guarantee its success. Often what is missed is that a service must fulfill a need, provide a benefit and enrich a lifestyle. Sunil Lakshmanasinghe, Nokia’s Country Director for Sri Lanka says his global company estimates that annual revenues from mobile services will increase globally by 40% between 2005 and 2010, from 417 billion Euros to 673 billion Euros with providing compelling services being the key for operators to secure a fair share of this revenue.

While estimating that revenue from voice will still record the highest growth, Nokia, which has the leading position in networks and more than 30% share of the global handset market, is confident that additional growth will be driven by the increasing use of ‘rich calls’(video sharing, Push to Talk etc), thus increasing sophisticated voice usage minutes in saturated markets. This will be driven by a decline in prices and the introduction of Voice over IP (VoIP) services, with new use patterns and fixed to mobile conversions in the world’s enterprise markets. With transitions in the eco system of mobile voice services, traditional mobile operators must ask themselves what kind of strategy will bring the largest revenue streams, he said in a statement.

Operators have often established brands that are hard to challenge as well as an excellent knowledge of user preferences. Take for instance, with end-to-end mobile telephony players like Nokia, operators can enhance their existing voice offering into rich calls.

These include easy to use Video Sharing, Push to Talk (PoC) and Push to Content solutions that bring additional value to subscribers and boost mobile operator revenue. In a study of 3G users last year, basic video calling was seen as one of the two key reasons for subscribing to 3G in two of the four examined markets.

He said the popularity of the basic video call may stem from its novelty value, one that may be short lived in some markets. However the evolution of more sophisticated video calls such as Push to Show and Video Sharing is likely to inspire a lasting use of video calls among the mass market. This service is more spontaneous and users can add a video component to a voice call on demand which gives more privacy and share information real-time.