LATAM Telecom

"When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure." ~Peter Marshall Technology companies tend to view the Latin American mobile market as a single block; this might be in part because of the similarities in key demographic and economic factors including language, GDP and mobile penetration as well as the presence of two large players -Telefonica and America Movil- that dominate the region. The Latin American mobile market, however, is incredibly complex. Each country shows remarkably different subscriber usage behavior patterns and adoption of technologies; this translates into different needs and consequently, different opportunities for each market. Opportunity Maps are particularly useful in analyzing and understanding these differences. The chart above shows three key factors: (x) Average Monthly SMS; (y) MOU - Minutes of Usage; and ARPU - Monthly Average Revenue per User (bubble size) for t...

Subscriber usage behavior clearly shows that the Latin American market is ready for a solution such as GSMA Personal IM, also known as SMS 2.0 (Telefonica Spain, Acision) or Instant SMS (Comverse). The chart above measures three elements: Data ARPU (x), mobile penetration (y) and average number of SMS messages per user per month for several Latin American countries (1) . The countries with SMS usage in the region are Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador; with Colombia having the lowest SMS usage. These countries also have a higher data ARPU; this is not surprising as in Latin America 70% to 90% of data revenue comes from SMS. What's relevant here is subscriber SMS usage, surpassing 100 messages per user per month as in the case of Venezuela and more recently Argentina; this tells us that heavy users are actually having live conversations using SMS; in other words, a segment of subscribers uses SMS as Instant Messaging, with a higher number of messages going back and forth per conversa...