News and commentary from GSMA Asia Mobile Congress/Hong Kong

I had the honor to present to the GSM Association Asia Mobile Congress today here in Hong Kong. It is a very prestigious event featuring keynotes from CEO's of just about the Who's Who of Asian mobile telecoms, ie CEO of China Mobile (world's largest mobile operator), CEO of NTT DoCoMo the singularly most innovative company in the history of mobile - as well as the company that launched this whole industry 30 years ago, etc. And as Asia itself is the most advanced market for mobile telecoms, this is really the 2 day event if you want an overview of the cutting edge, and often bleeding edge of the mobile telecoms industry.

I did a live Twitter feed from the event today, and will continue tomorrow on Day 2. But Twitter updates are, haha, well, very brief. There were several matters that needed a bit more commetary or context. So I am doing an update now, with those items I considered most newsworthy and relevant, and mention them here, with my commentary. Welcome to the future of the digitally converging world.

To start it off, Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association gave a number of predictions. The stunning one to me, was that he said there would be the "next 4 billion mobile subscribers" and the world would grow to 8 billion subscriptions, ie the planet's 6.8 billion people would in many cases have 2 or more subscriptions. Now, the regular readers of my book and this blog will know, I have been saying that for a long time. The stunning part is that already now the GSM Association is willing to say that will happen. Amazing. You can take it to the bank, the world total mobile phone population will double from where it was at the start of the year, and yes, the whole planet will have more phones than people. Cool.

Next up was Chairman Chang Xiaobing from China Unicom. (What is China Unicom? China's second largest mobile operator with 142 million subscribers - bigger than AT&T and Sprint put together). Chairman Chang had listed SMS, WAP and MMS as 'mature' technologies for China. Here a vital comment - in many markets of the world, MMS is an emergent technology. Even in many parts of Europe or North America, MMS has less than one in three users. In China it is so massive and common, it is 'mature' like SMS and WAP. Great. And yes, I keep saying, don't focus on the tiny opportunities of smartphones or apps stores, go for the truly giant opportunities - MMS has 1.4 billlion active users worldwide and over 2.5 billion phones can accept MMS services and communications - here is your big opportunity.

Then Manoj Kohli, the CEO of Bharti Telecom of India (another giant, Bharti has over 110 million subscribers). Mr Kohli told the conference that in India already 20% of all mobile phone owners have 2 or more subscriptions. He also told us that as India will add 500 million new subscribers by the time frame of 2014-2015. That is another Europe, folks, in size. India is currently adding 10 million new mobile subscribers every month. And most revealingly, he said that in India the customers will go from 'no internet' directly to 'mobile internet'. The vast majority of Indian internet users will skip the PC metaphor internet. And as I tweeted this, several friends retweeted it adding that this will also happen in markets such as Indonesia and the Philippines. Yes I agree.

Next we heard from Wang Jianzhou the Chairman and CEO of China Mobile, the world's biggest mobile operator (yeah, China nMobile alone has over 11% of the total global mobile phone subcriber base, and yes, at 500 million paying customers on mobile, thats as big as all of Europe, or nearly twice the mobile phone subscriber base of the USA). We were told that on the Chinese 3G standard of TD-SCDMA, they already have 3G phones being sold that cost about 1,000 Yuan, or about 130 US dollars. The average China Mobile customer spends 1 minute per day on voice calls, but sends on average 3.6 SMS text messages per day.

Then we had Yamada-san, the President and CEO of Japan's NTT DoCoMo, Mr Ryuji Yamada. NTT was the company that commercially launched mobile telecoms 30 years ago, and NTT DoCoMo, its mobile spin-off invented the mobile internet ten years ago. This is the most innovative company in mobile of all time - apps stores, WiFi phones, mobile advertising, mobile wallet, QR Codes, you name it, NTT DoCoMo did it first. And bboy what a treat we had from Yamada-san on where the most advanced mobile telecoms market - Japan - is today, and where it is headed.

We heard that on NTT DoCoMo's network, today already 42% of their total revenues come from non-voice data services. Like I've been saying for a while, don't call it a mobile 'phone' (or cellphone) anymore, call it just a mobile, that is more accurate. But yes, then a bombshell - NTT DoCoMo is so far in its migration of its customer base from 2G to 3G, they will terminate 2G in March of 2011. Wow. 16 more months. Wow. Think of how far they are in the future. Two years ago the 'hot' and 'sexy' phone in North America was the original 2G iPhone (which was never sold in Japan due to being obsolete). Now Japan is already shutting off their network that is on that generation. China just started 3G this year. Many countries like India have not even allocated 3G spectrum yet, but Japan is turning 2G off. This is mega. And yeah, makes sense that it would be in Japan first (and on NTT DoCoMo's network at that). Cool. Brave move, congrats to NTT DoCoMo.

Yamada-san also told us of their new 3G video TV service, they call BeeTV. BeeTV is special in that it is optimized for the small screen, not re-purposed video content from TV and the internet. BeeTV in only six months has achieved 800,000 paying subscribers - who pay 315 Yen per month (about 3 USD). And racing to be first with 'real' 4G - not the hyped propaganda so-called 4G of WiMax etc that many now offer (the ITU will nont ratify the standard(s) for 4G until October of next year, so nobody can have 4G before then - NTT DoCoMo is committed to launching LTE this December 2009 with data cards, and bring in LTE phones in 2011  Cool. If LTE is accepted as 4G, as is widely expected - then NTT/NTT DoCoMo would have been the first to launch 1G, 3G and 4G (Finland's Radiolinja/Elisa - spoiled the streak launching 2G first when they opened the first GSM network into commercial production, yeah, Elisa was my former employer too haha..)

But wait, we are not done with the massive announcements and updates from the world's most advanced mobile operator. Yamada-San's 20 minute presentation also told us that NTT DoCoMo's i-Consierge service (yes, think of it as your personal butler, the phone learns your habits and starts to help you with your life, this is like magic) has 2.3 million paying subscribers one year from launch. Their i-Channel idle screen invention (one of the case studies in my latest hardcover book Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media) is spreading and they have launched it also with their partner in India, Tata, who offer Cricket game updates via the idle screen using i-Channel. And what of smart phones and apps stores? NTT DoCoMo feels the future is for open systems, not closed ones like the iPhone, and they are bringing their Symbian based smartphone O/S and apps stores to be fully open.

And if that was not enough, we had more today from a 50/50 partnership between NTT DoCoMo, and Japan's biggest ad agency, Dentsu. The company is called D2 (or formally, D2C) and its President and CEO, Akihisa Fujita presented to the afternoon session. Fujita-san was my techno-geek hero, by not only doing his presentation totally from a smartphone - and his had several animations and video clips with sounds etc - but also, he did the whole presentation using two phones, one in each hand. Cool. I gotta master that haha, but yeah, it would take an Advertising Man to do something flashy like that. He was truly 'kawaii' (cool in Japanese). Yeah, D2 is the world's first national ad agency that was fully providing mobile ad services, and has been the innovator for the mAd industry for most of this decade. And boy did we get a treat again now.

First off, Fujita-san showed us a cool adver-app from Japan. It is a free 'flight simulator' game, in very realistic 3D graphics, where you can go and fly above major cities of the world. Note this is a Japanese adver-game, he showed the plane flying over London. What's the gimmic? Its an advergame by Red Bull of course, who sponsor that 'formula one' style airplane racing series. This is a related mobile game. Very very cool, I immediately wanted that onto my phone.

Oh, of those bizarre stats that say the mobile ad market globally this year is about 1 Billion dollars or so? Japan's mobile advertising market in 2008 was worth 900 million dollars. So it'll be a Billion dollars this year in Japan alone. Anyone who says the global mAd market is a billion or billion-and-a-half this year is clueless to this industry and you should ignore their numbers. But I digress, lets get back to D2. Do you like QR Codes, 2D barcodes? NTT DoCoMo of Japan (together with D2 obviously) launched them first. How big is usage today, four years later? 84% of all Japanese mobile phone users are active users of them. Yes, it will be big in your market too, this is so incredibly user-friendly, it will be a hit in absolutely every market.

Specific ad campaigns. We were treated to samples of several. I particularly liked a Coca Cola campaign for a new drink, that sent the first 300,000 Japanese consumers an m-coupon for a free can of the new drink. And the cans and coupons could be redeemed at vending machines. Cool. And then of adver-dramas on mobile TV. They had created a series of 'soap opera' style romantic drama mobisodes for a Japanese brand, which featured a parallel set of 2 'views' to the same story. You could watch the 'boy's view' or the 'girl's view' to the same story. All filmed obviously in a style very suited for the smaller screens of the phone. We saw 2 of the episodes, with the videos shown side-by-side, and it was very clear, that the 'clever bit' was that in this story the full romantic story-line was not obvious from viewing only one of the two, and viewers obviously would be very strongly incentivized to see both sides of the story - with the product-placement getting obviously double-exposure with the viewers. Very very clever.

Finally, Fujita-san gave us the most memorable quotation for the day. He said 'to sell mobile ads, is to reject mobile ads'. This most counter-intuitive statement made sense when he explained - that there will be lots of opportunities to push ads at consumers, that are not optimal, the ad itself not suited, or the situation not optimal. The mobile is not the only channel. Often another channel is better for that use. The advertising exectuive needs to be very critical and selective, to only use mobile when it truly suits the situation - because mobile is so personal. We must always thrive to bring excellence and customer satisfaction on mobile services and content, even more so on advertising on mobile. So yes, the ad exec must be brave enough to say, no, lets not do that on mobile. That will ensure that what goes on mobile will bring satisfied customers, and in the long run, a far more healthy and wealthy mobile advertising eco-system. Very clever, very insightful.

Finally, at the end of the day we had the GSM Association Asia Mobile Awards. Many of my friends and customers were represented among the finalists and many won. I don't want to mention all of them here. I want to single out one winner, as this was amazing. Grameenphone and Huawei won the 'Green Mobile' award for their 'green' network initiatives. What makes this amazing, is that this is obviously in Bangladesh, a country very poor and where average ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is under 5 dollars, and new customer ARPU is as low as one dollar per month. In the West we used to think that you needed a minimum of 20 dollars per subscriber per month to make this business sustain any profits. Grameenphone is managing it at a tiny fraction of that - but here is now the point - Grameenphone has been able to do major 'green' initiatives in their network, inspite of the very low revenues per subscriber that are involved. It makes this achievement truly exceptional. Congratulations to all my friends at Grameenphone and obviously their parents, Telenor (my first reference customer from back in 2001).

That was Day 1 at the Mobile Asia Congress. I will also Tweet from Day 2, and if the day is anything like today, probably also be forced to do another blog about it, haha. I had a wonderful time today (my presentation was about the 6 business models of mobile social networking).

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[Zahid]

Thanks Tomi, really enjoyed reading it.

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[Walter Adamson]

Great stuff, but hey Tomi you know that you are wasting your time, all that stuff will only work in Japan, right hahahahahahaha. Your notes took me back to my enthusiastic days about all this - you've got more skills in dealing with our xenophobic colleagues than me, good man! Walter Adamson @g2m http://xeesm.com/walter

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Zahid, hence and Walter

Thank you Zahid and hence.

Walter, haha, good one. Yeah, its at times quite draining, but we try. Happy to see your comments here every so often too, to know friendly minds are still hanging around this blog (and Zahid obviously you too)

Tomi Ahonen :-)

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