Emerging markets boost Vodafone
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Vodafone sees its customer base rise more than expected in the last quarter of 2006, thanks to emerging markets.
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Mobile-phone giant Vodafone's purchase of a 11.1-billion-dollar stake in India's Hutchison Essar has been welcomed by local contenders, smoothing its entry into the world's fastest-growing wireless market.
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As it reported results on Tuesday, the Vodafone Group, the world&#39;s largest mobile phone operator, said that it would double dividends and increase a share buyback program by Â£1 billion ($1.9 billion).
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Nokia, the world's top cellphone maker, reported a 57 percent rise in earnings per share in the October-to-December quarter, with booming demand in emerging markets boosting its global market share to 40 percent.
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(InfoWorld) - In mature economies, the mobile phone started out as a luxury item, a convenient way to talk to friends and family from anywhere. But in emerging markets, first-time users are turning to mobile phones for more than convenient chatter. They're using their phones as the only way to access the Internet, to use banks for the first time, and to start small businesses. Opera Software, Vodafone Group, Google, and Nokia are among the companies that have recently offered evidence of the use of the mobile Web and other non-voice applications in emerging markets. In general, the use of mobile phones in developing economies is booming. The number of mobile subscribers in developing countries grew five-fold from 2000 to 2005, reaching 1.4 billion and accounting for 70 percent of the total global market, according to a recent report from Vodafone, The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor and World Resource Institute. Those subscribers are doing more than talking. "Mobile is becoming a significant way to access the Web and a growing number of people will get their first experience of the Net on a mobile device," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and chief executive at Nokia, during a recent investors conference. He says it makes sense that people in some emerging markets would use their phones instead of PCs to access the Internet. In India, for example, 136 million people have mobile phones and fewer than 20 million have PCs, Kallasvuo said. Nokia has evidence of the predominance of mobile Web users outside of developed regions. Its mobile-enabled Web site gets around 90 million hits every month and 60 million of those come from users in China, Kallasvuo said. Google has also recognized the trend. "Mobile devices in India and China are the primary devices for users to experience the Internet," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development for Google, speaking during a recent conference. With 1 billion Internet users and 2 billion mobile users around the world, it makes sense for Google to tweak its offerings for mobile users, he said. Browser developer Opera says that downloads of its Opera Mini client also demonstrate the widespread use of mobile phones to access the Web in developing economies. While Opera has primarily marketed Opera Mini in developed markets, India, South Africa, China, and Russia are among the top 10 regions for Opera Mini downloads, said Tor Odland, an Opera spokesman. Worldwide, 8 million people have installed Opera Mini, a small browser that users download onto their phones. The software communicates with Opera servers, which strip down Web sites so that they'll load quickly and fit nicely onto the small screens of mobile phones. Opera Mini is popular in Bangladesh and has lead to increased usage of Grameenphone Ltd.'s EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) network, said Shakil Ahmed, an engineer at Grameenphone. More than 1 million people subscribe to Grameenphone's EDGE offering with 250,000 of them regular users of the mobile Internet, he said. Grameenphone customers like Opera Mini because it lets them access the Web without owning a PC, he said. Because Opera hosts the servers that the phone software connects with to access the Internet, it can track where traffic is coming from. Recently, traffic in Africa has been growing, Odland said. Those African customers could be using Internet connections on their phones to do banking. Vodafone's recent report concluded that while using banks makes poor people less vulnerable in times of crisis, low-income people in Africa often don't bank because branches may be far from their homes and because transactions at cash machines and branches often incur fees. South Africa is an example of a place that could be ideal for mobile banking. Among people in South Africa who don't use banks, 19 percent have a cell phone and an additional 11 percent have access to a friend or family member's cell phone, the study found. The research also found that 94 percent of low-income people in South Africa who already do mobile banking say it's valuable because it's more affordable than traditional banking. Opera reports that despite not marketing Opera Mini in South Africa, 200,000 people in the country have downloaded the client. In 2005, just under 10 percent of the population of South Africa had Internet access, according to Research4Business, a research firm. Anecdotally, Opera is also seeing increased usage of Opera Mini in Nigeria. The company has been receiving e-mails from Nigerian users with questions on using the browser and other comments. One enterprising Nigerian, who e-mailed Opera with his story, found that people were asking him for help downloading and starting to use Opera Mini, said Rolf Assev, chief commercial officer for Opera. The Nigerian entrepreneur put an advertisement in the newspaper and now charges a fee for instruction on how to use the Internet via Opera Mini on cell phones. "He said, 'this is beautiful. People don't have computers but a lot of people have phones,'" Assev said.
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Vodafone Group Plc plans to lure more than 10 million customers to the company&#39;s high-speed mobile- phone services by March 2006, the first indication of how it plans to generate sales from licenses that cost $20 billion.
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Thanks to Vodafone's global size, it is now cheaper for Vodafone Sweden's business customers to work mobile while on business trips abroad and easier to manage the costs.
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Vodafone Group Plc, the world&#39;s largest mobile-phone operator, expects cost cuts and bulk-order savings to boost earnings by more than a third before 2008, as the company reins in spending from Germany to Albania.
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Mobile phones are expected to generate more money this year than traditional fixed-line services for the first time due to surging demand in developing countries such as China, India and Russia, an annual industry report said.
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Mobile phone giant Vodafone   unveiled plans to return an extra 3 billion pounds (&#36;5.6  billion) to investors and hiked its dividends on Tuesday,  spicing a well-flagged new strategy to cut costs and embrace  new technology.
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Nokia , the world's top cellphone maker, reported a 57 percent rise in earnings per share from October to December, with booming demand in emerging markets boosting its global market share to 40 percent.
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The wireless service provider seeks growth in emerging markets.
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LONDON -- Cell phone giant Vodafone Group PLC, which has spent years struggling to recoup billions spent on 3G licences, finally launched the cutting-edge service Wednesday in much of Europe and introduced or beefed up its operation in a dozen other
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(InfoWorld) - Some mobile phone companies are looking to emerging markets to find early adopters and for a glimpse at services of the future, CEOs said during the opening day keynote of theÂ 3GSM conferenceÂ in Barcelona on Tuesday. In Senegal, for example, customers eagerly use a mobile Internet TV service that includes a DVR (digital video recorder) feature. "It's more advanced than in many other places," said Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of operator Orange. The keynote focused on the importance of emerging markets to the future of the mobile industry. That compares with last year's opening keynote, which focused largely on the potential of wireless content services. Vodafone Group's CEO Arun Sarin pointed to South Africa, where HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) users make up 30 percent of the entire broadband market. That number is expected to increase to 50 percent by 2010, he said. Users in emerging markets are taking up such new technologies as mobile broadband because they don't have quality fixed-line networks, he said. The lack of quality landline networks may also be driving people in developing markets to exclusively use wireless, he said. In Europe, on average, 35 percent of phone usage is on mobile networks while in developing markets more than 50 percent of minutes are on mobile networks, he said. Naquib Sawaris, chairman and CEO of Orascom Telecom Holding, an operator offering services in Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, and Iraq, put it most succinctly. "You have two Indians and an Egyptian on this stage: It's our time," he said. Sarin also commented onÂ Vodafone's recent winÂ of a controlling interest in Indian operator Hutchison Essar. Mobile phone penetration in India is around 13 percent and Sarin expects that to grow to 40 percent, or 500 million subscribers, in a few years. Indians like to talk too, with an average of 400 minutes of use per subscriber per month, he said. That compares to 150 minutes in Europe.
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Orascom Telecom, a leading mobile operator in emerging markets, has raised the possibility that it could be sold as part of further industry consolidation.
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Vodafone has doubled its half-year dividend to 1.91 pence, the top end of forecasts, and extended a full-year share buy-back programme after strong underlying results.
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Vodafone yesterday announced plans to raise an additional Â£2.5bn a year through cost savings and increasing its market share within the next four years.