LATAM Telecom

Following a fierce battle with America Movil for exclusivity in the launch of the iPhone in Latin America, both America Movil and Telefonica were able sign an agreement with Apple. America Movil was able to leverage the fact that they were first to sign with Apple and Telefonica Movistar, trailing behind, decided to rush to the market in Chile and Argentina with minimal preparation. We were very surprised to confirm that the iPhone was not launched by Telefonica Movistar with all services -mainly visual voice mail- just to be able to have the same launch date as Claro (America Movil). Not only is it very unsual that Apple allows this -we know of no other region where this has happened- but the potential for increasing data usage and revenue seems to be completely bypassed. As we mentioned here before , the iPhone represents a breakthrough product with high potential for increasing data revenues and repositioning traditional services such as SMS and Voice Mail. For example, despite not

This is a follow up to our last post from June! We took a long break but are back with more news and analaysis. It has been more than a month since the iPhone was first launched in Latin America, after much anticipation and a fierce battle between Telefonica and America Movil (see links here and here ). Now we hear that other major operators, as we anticipated here , are preparing for a possible iPhone launch, including TIM Brazil and Telecom Personal Argnetina. It is still early to evaluate results since the first launch (Telcel Mexico in July, Argentina and Chile in August) was only a few months ago, but it seems the rush from Telefonica Movistar to sell the iPhone might spoil the market. Moe on this in our next post ....