Market corner - 11/11/07

A few set of market information released this week:

• According to Arcep, France' s mobile penetration rose to 84%, or 53m mobile subscribers by Sept.-end.

• Ecology: Orange and Sagem signed a strategic alliance to develop and make products with a greatly reduced impact on the environment. First products in 2008.

• According to IES, the US managed-services market demand is high, highly competitive, moves towards smaller businesses (SMBs) and large managed-service providers have to face competition from myriad providers.

• The Femto Forum announced the addition of more than 30 member companies, and now includes major operators and equipment vendors.

• According to Symbian, over 20m (+56%) Symbian-based smartphones were shipped in 3Q07.

• The DSL technology is not limited to few Mbit/s throughput. A scientist in Australia (Melbourne University) should have developed a new algorithm for boosting ADSL bandwidth to over 100 Mbit/s. The copper line is not over!!

• According to In-Stat, the GPS chipset market will be driven by integration into mobile devices, and sales of mobile devices with integrated GPS are expected to grow 300% to 720m units in 2011.

• Infonetics forecasts that sales of mobile video phones would reach $125bn by 2010 (from $58bn in 2006), while mobile video users would jump to almost 57m by 2010.

• 22% (or 8.7m) of French fixed lines are used for VOIP, according to Arcep.

• According to Informa Telecoms, 'super 3G' devices would become the largest selling handset type with almost 36% of all handset sold in 2012 (from current low 2%).

• According to Gartner, most traditional telecom operator would fail if they try exploiting content. Three successful business models for them could be: Content innovator but with differentiated content; aggregator only involved in sourcing and packaging content, and Bit Pipe carrier just based on connectivity as a utility.

• Maravedis reports commercial WiMAX deployments status. Almost 535k WiMAX subscribers generating some $1bn in 2007 and an ARPU of $45 for residential and $144 for businesses.

• According to Ovum-RHK, mobile operators would spend $37bn on wireless backhaul in 2012, while the backhaul transport equipment would account for $7.3bn (CAGR of 43%).

• The World Bank plans to double its investment in the information and communications sector in Africa to $2bn by 2012.

• China would pass 900m phone subscribers by the end of the year, from 895m at the end of Sept. (of which 523m mobile and 372m fixed).