Malaysia Mobile market getting saturated..

Image via Wikipedia Referring to the following article ..

Surge in Mobile Users..

it says currently,
14.6 millions people are mobile phone users, out of the total population of 20 millions. This makes the total percentage of 58%. The author quoted this as the penetration percentage, but in actual fact, it may not be 58%. Penetration rates could be a different figures because based on affordability,needs and other issue. Urban area would have higher penetration rate compare to rural.

Analyst assumes that when the percentage reaches 65%, the market will be saturated. this would means that no new retailer should be accepted, otherwise, the old retailer would lose business to the new one and vice versa.

Then, it says "For a developing country like Malaysia, some pundits believe cellular companies (celcos) may have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for the next wave of customers. Other analysts believe the celcos could rev up subscriber numbers by lowering entry barriers further."

This means that they(telcos) come out with something new or just continue to drop the cost of ownership to allow more people to have mobile phone service. (Which they had already planning to give free sim pack to those who purchased more than RM50 topup.)

The author concludes with the following analysis:
"The challenge for operators this year is to continue to keep the market excited with products and services that the consumers want, especially the youth market that most of the celcos are focusing on."

Market excitement is most important for one thing..
--> Get people to spend unnecessary money. Think about it, it is not about making important phone calls anymore.. we don't need to encourage or remind people to make important phone calls, but yet with excitement, people don't mind paying more for something extra which is conceived as fun.

The secondary reason is related branding .. either they are interested to protect share holder interests or whatsoever, any new initiatives would means good for the respective stock counters.

Tertially of course is to compete well in the market and then finally I would say is that activities would translate back to revenue and creates more jobs (at least maintain job) and sometimes business opportunity to others.

One way to rave up excitement is by implementing low value top-up, which was pretty much the essence of 2004 competition.. Started off with Digi, then Maxis followed and finally Celcom.
But such initiative is considered thumb-down by many retailers.. because profit per unit is minimal. No doubt the number of transaction has increased, but the money actually came in slowly.

Singapore reached 80% penetration rate, Hong Kong = 90% while taiwan = 100%. This means that Malaysia is the right place for telecommunication enterprising..