Description

The enterprise market for mobile services is an attractive and growing opportunity. It offers high ARPS, low churn and stable growth. Furthermore, there are new growth areas, particularly in the machine-to-machine segment, and there are also underexploited ones — in particular the informal business market in emerging markets.

When looking at the mobile enterprise market, perhaps one of the most important and often overlooked differences between developed and emerging markets is the scale of the informal economy, which refers not only to illegal activities, but also to those that just are not registered, a fact overlooked by governments in emerging markets, given the scale of such activities.

Other, more obvious differences include lower levels of income, coverage and capacity limitations of fixed networks, lower adoption, the predominance of prepaid billing, lower PC adoption and lower affordability (and hence lower adoption) of sophisticated devices. Furthermore, when looking at the enterprise markets of telecom service providers in emerging markets there are additional differences such as the lesser importance of the services sector, the predominance of agriculture and extraction in the economy, and less use of sophisticated information and communications technology systems and applications.

At the same time, targeting businesses in emerging markets differs from targeting consumers much as it does in mature economies, in aspects such as lower price sensitivity, a high portion of calls that are internal, stronger demand for international services and high peak-time usage. It is often useful when evaluating opportunities in emerging markets to benchmark and compare them with more mature markets, and therefore this report includes many references to operators in developed markets.

Mobile Enterprise Services in Emerging Markets analyzes the prospects of mobile services targeting enterprises of all sizes in emerging markets. The report evaluates services and mobile network operators with an eye to the uniqueness of each market while continually referencing more mature markets. It assesses the prospects of various business-oriented services as well as specific initiatives, looking at the roles of applications such as SMS, email, m-commerce and digital signatures as well as M2M services — telematics and telemetry. Handsets, netbooks and laptops are also discussed. Seven case studies covering mobile operators, enterprises and a WiMAX operator examine Autotransportes de Carga Tres Guerras in Mexico, Zap in Kenya and Tanzania, Hospital Espanhol in Brazil, Vodacom Business in South Africa, Yota and MTS in Russia, and Vodafone in Romania.