Step 1: Note BBC article on Growth concerns rattle Vodafone:
“Vodafone has been struggling to reverse a drop in Japanese user numbers. Fears over slower growth at Vodafone in the coming year have driven shares in the mobile phone giant sharply lower.”
Step 2: Ask which product 90% of the revenue comes from.
Step 3: Ask how they’ve improved this product to distinguish it from the competition as a result of their tens of billions of network upgrade expenditure.
For the usual fee, I’ll run a workshop for them with steps 4, 5 and 6 :)
Isn’t it an amazing industry where the one product that hardly ever changes or improves is the one that pays the bills? We can make 8-megapixel camera phone, but we can’t seem to get into market one with better audio quality or that can handle voicemails offline.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 04:40 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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The huge success of the cell phone industry has been taken by many as a proof that connectivity has a greater value for the consumers than broadcasting of any kind of content.
People prefer to be active consumers instead of passive listeners or watchers.
This explains the bigger success of telephone connectivity compared to radio and tv broadcasting.
But no industry can have an ethernal growth based just on one product, in this case on voice.
Sooner or later the market (partially artificially manouvered) reaches its apex.
What the investors understand is that there is no valid and better alternative for a mobile phone than voice.
While it still will bring very high profits (in this case revenues and profits are very close, since the content IS PRODUCED by the user, doesn't have any copyright burden, no expenses to its production)it won't grow anymore, and probably will struggle to keep this level.
People cannot talk 24 hours a day on a phone.(they are supposed to have better things to do)
The only feature they could improve would be the quality of voice, but that hardly will bring more revenues, just less profits.
Patrizia
http://woip.blogspot.com
Posted by: at November 16, 2005 07:50 AM