Market -17-01-05 - N47

A few set of market information released this week:

[                  I-mode subscribers in France reached 1m mark. The I-mode operator, Bouygues Telecom, reported that women account for 40% and older than 31 account for 51%.

[                  UK Post Office is back on the telephony market after an absence of 24 years. PO targets signing up 1m customers, by 2008. It is a direct assault on BT.

[                  French ISP Free is offering a 20 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream DSL service based on ADSL2+ technology for € 30.

[                  Yankee Group is warning that push-to-talk (PTT/PoC) success in the US could not be duplicated elsewhere. Launching PTT could be challenging in a GSM/GPRS environment.

[                  Ericsson will launch its new slogan "Taking you forward" instead of "Make yourself heard".

[                  3G Americas and The Association of Telecommunications Enterprises of the Andean Community (ASETA) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a mutual cooperation.

[                  According to Pyramid, several high-profile MVNOs will be launched in the US this year.

[                  UMTS infra spending should reach $ 10bn according to Pyramid Research.

According to a report from Bank of America, Nokia sold around 203m mobile phones in 2004 (up 13%+), followed by Motorola with about 100M units (+32%), Samsung far behind with about 56m units (+59%), Siemens with 47m units (+8%) and LG with 43.5m units (+59%). In terms of market share, the results are: Nokia: 30%+, Motorola: 15%-, Samsung: 13%+, Siemens: 7% and LG: 6.5%.

The Mobile Imaging and Printing Consortium (MIPC), an industry group developing solutions and implementation guidelines for printing images captured with camera phones, has announced their first set of guidelines for the mobile and printing industry. As a result, consumers can expect seamless interoperability between a broad base of mobile phones and printers.

Ranking telecom operators:         by revenues (rounded) and        profit 

1                                 NTT             with                  € 87bn                          € 5bn

2                                 DT                                      € 56bn                          € 2.9bn

3                                 Verizon                               € 54bn                          € 2.4bn

4                                 FT                                      € 46bn                          € 5.3bn

5                                 Vodafone                            € 42bn                          <0