Telecom Argentina - does SMS success reflect missed opportunities?

Cellular News (link to story here) reports that "... In its third quarter results for 2008 Telecom Argentina’s Personal unit recorded its fourth successive year-on-year increase in quarterly average ARPU – an impressive result in a market which now has a penetration rate of 104%".
As we have mentioned here before, SMS represents for most countries in Latin America up to 90% of data revenue. SMS is a mature product that maintains its status as cash cow, however, the fact that this service is profitable and successful takes attention away from the fact that up until now, operators in Latin America have not been successful with the introduction of new services that effectively contribute to the bottom line.
Recently we talked about how the recent launch of the iPhone in Latin America by Movistar and America Movil is shaping to be a missed opportunity (see here and here) as they are NOT approaching it as an opportunity to increase data usage but rather treating at as just another device, the "flavor" of the month.
Interestingly, it is precisely for this reason that Telecom Personal decided to wait and maybe delay indefinitely its own iPhone launch.
However, even though we applaud their success in continually increasing SMS usage, we also believe there are missed opportunities and that this might actually reflect their lack of a more aggressive and complete data / messaging strategy that can include Instant Messaging, Personal Messaging (GSMA), MMS and Push Mail. We will continue to discuss this topic in future posts.

Comments

  1. Anonymous3:10 PM

    Hi!, I read your post about Telecom Argentina, you are right the data usage (besides SMS) in Latin America is almost null.
    I believe that it is because of two reasons: A) most of the subscribers are prepaid, when you are a prepaid customer you really would like to use your phone at the bare minimum, this is why they send SMS, it is even cheaper than talk and
    B) the Data plan offers in LA are too expensive, difficult to understand and without enough speed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9:03 AM

    Telecom SMS connetivity to other Latin America is almost none and it cannot reach Verizon, Sprint, Nextel in the US (there are missing many subs)

    ReplyDelete

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