Other point of view on ConsultantValueAdded’s post “Unregistered prepaid clients switch off? No business sense.”

Carlos,

your post http://consultantvalueadded.com/2009/10/26/unregistered-prepaid-clients-switch-off-no-business-sense/ made me post a comment, so objective achieved.

While agreeing with you that the law lacks common business sense, I don’t agree with some of your conclusions.

1. the law exists in all European countries, just in different degrees. Other European countries require registration of prepaid cards, but don’t require verification of DNI.

2. I don’t agree that Spanish MNOs will loose 9 mio customers. what will happen is that the Spanish market is finally cleaned up of it’s inactive SIMs and market penetration gets closer to reality

3. I think ARPU could in contrary go up for above mentioned effect. less inactive.

4. Actually I think it’s a great opportunity for teh new alternative MVNOs, because they will capture a big junk of customers that so far just for inertia have not switched operator and are now forced to do so.

So, while the implementation makes no business sense for lot’s of reasons, e.g. disadvantages for MVNOs with alternative distribution channels, for the market it could in fact be healthy.

just a different point of view ;-)

Ebay sells majority in skype for amazing price – a win-win-win deal?!

I was quite surprised today to read the headline of the deal between ebay and a private equity about the sale of the majority of skype. But I was even more surprised about the price they achieved, which values skype at $2.75billion. ebay paid including payouts to founders about $3.1bn, but had written down later $900millions.

Obviously ebay could neither find the benefits or integrate skype, nor were they able to grow the business with a clear vision.
This deal could be a real win-win-win. Considering that ebay got a good price, kept a participation to still get an upside and the investors obviously see more value in Skype. At a level of estimated $600 million revenues this year, more than 405 million registered users and generating profits (source spiegel.de: talks about a growth of 25% of benefits to $170 million in the 2nd quarter).

I share the vision of the investors that skype with the increasing penetration of powerful smartphones like Google Android or iphones has a great opportunity to establish itself as the leading VoIP tool for the mobile market as well.
The Telco operator start feeling the pressure and might realize that the iphone is more of a value destroyer than creator (see also Strand Consult latest report “The moment of truth, a portrait of the iphone”)

Mobile data prices are plummeting as you can see in Spain with pay-as-you-go prices of 3ct/MB and e.g. UK/Italy/Austria (basically 3 Three territory) with 15€/mes for 15GB !!!

What do you think, are we getting to a mayor disruption in telecommunications with the shift to VoIP happening acceleratingly fast and mobile operators will one morning just wake up with no high-margin circuit-switched calls left?!

From a consumer and innovation perspective we can only hope so. It will enable us to communicate free with friendss all over the world wherever we are.

[Also the latest beta versions of skype have great collaboration features like sharing the desktop on video calls! try it out]

[just saw that Enrique Dans is commenting on the cost of international calls. "Will be FREE"]

Interesting question – will Skype succeed on mobiles?

In today’s fiercewireless newsletter Lynette Luna is asking if “Skype’s persistence finally paying off?“

I’m actually using Skype on my mobile since two weeks!

In an effort to install several mobile applications (e.g. Shozu) on my Nokia E71 to become truly always connected (like the Japanese I just visited), I’ve also installed fring a little application that allows you to connect e.g. with twitter, but also with your skype account. Other than the skype application for available for the E71, fring also allows you to do voice calls apart from the regular chats. It actually works quite well on the 3G network.

While most (almost all) mobile operators are still fighting skype, I have no doubt that with the proliferation of the new generation of mobile phones (iphone, Androids, Symbians) Skype will finally get some traction also in the mobile world. UK’s 3 might be the first who is actively pushing it (3′s strategy is worth a separate post another day!), but others are tolerating it and some MVNOs might be able to follow the lead.

Anyone on VoIP on mobile networks?