While the mobile data business broke several new records in the first quarter - and with more ready to fall - most operators aren't yet totally confident about their mobile broadband business models (and the services that support them). So globally, who's getting it right? By Peggy Albright
Softbank, the third-ranked operator in Japan, just became the first of major operator to draw most of its revenues from data services rather than voice, attributing 55 per cent of its revenues in the first quarter to data, according to a new study published by Chetan Sharma Consulting. The firm predicts that Japan's NTT DoCoMo will cross the 50 per cent data revenue milestone later this year and that the major US operators will reach that meaningful marker in late 2012 or early 2013.
Softbank, which enjoys a role as Japan’s exclusive provider of the iPhone and now the iPad, has crafted an effective business strategy by targeting young, data centric customers with the iPhone.
The Japanese market is steadily losing interest in voice, which does help give data a greater proportion of revenues, but the declining voice revenues in the country are dragging overall ARPUs down despite mobile data growth. Softbank has been able to shine by overcoming this trend. According to the Wall St. Journal, Softbank’s data revenues during the quarter have improved the company’s overall ARPUs in this context.
The company has effectively used the iPhone to “lead the mobile Internet scene” in the country, and this helped it become profitable after a year of losses associated with older operations. The company added about 1.24 million subscribers in the quarter. The iPhone represents about 72 per cent of the smartphones shipped in the country, the WSJ said, citing the MM Research Institute, a Japanese firm.
The worldwide ranking of mobile operators based on data revenues also saw a significant shift during the quarter, the Chetan Sharma Consulting study reported.
In a comparison of single-country operators - those that do business only in one country - Verizon Wireless in the US became the top carrier worldwide on the basis of quarterly mobile data revenues, edging Japan’s NTT DoCoMo out of the top spot that it had held for years.
The competition is also getting more intense in this metric.
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