>On Tuesday, October 30, 2001, at 11:09 , Daniel Helmer wrote:
>>I'm a bit curious as to why it is the Vodafone influence that leads
>>J-Phone to push for prepaid. I would think the opposite.
>Benjamin wrote:
>And I am curious as to whether you can back up what appears to be a
>generalisation that prepaid mobile is unprofitable.
OK, perhaps I was generalising a bit. I don't mean to suggest all prepaid
customer are unprofitable, but the ARPU tend to be considerable lower, and
therefore less attractive to the carriers. And the unprofitable customers
are more likely to be in prepaid rather than postpaid.
Obviously, a mobile operators product mix should cover the whole spectrum of
customers, but in the name of ARPU, need to find a good balance between
lower and higher spending customers. To go after the remaining population
currently without mobile phones to increase penetration rates from 60%-80%,
as Graham suggested in his initial posting, inevitable involves mainly
low-spending (and arguably prepaid) customers.
Each market is unique, as your example with Italy (90% prepaid) shows.
Australia is not predominanly a prepaid market, and Vodafone here has a
larger portion of low spending prepaid customers than their competitors.
By the way, Benjamin, I have noticed how you manage to include a plug for
CAMEL in pretty much everything you write these days...;-)
Cheers,
Daniel Helmer
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Received on Wed Oct 31 04:19:30 2001