Malaysian telcos, like their counterparts around the world, are hopeful that MMS will take off and drive data usage. However, analysts aren’t offering much hope. “This evolution will take time to be realised here, due to a lack of technology ‘adeptness’ among Malaysian subscribers,” says Janice Chong, Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific analyst for telecom research. The reasons cite are the usual – high handset and bandwidth costs.
“The optimism of the industry just doesn’t seem to gel with analyst numbers. According to Eleana Liew, Gartner Asia Pacific principal analyst for telecommunications, active Malaysian users send about two MMSes per month, while South Korea averages three MMSes per user per month. Frost & Sullivan’s Chong had more upbeat figures. “MMS revenue in Asia Pacific was valued at US$397.1mil (RM1.5bil) in 2003, with Japan accounting for 68.7% of the market and South Korea for 15.1%,” she says. ”
Companies still find the main data revenue generator to be SMS. This article details how Maxis had more than 100,000 active MMS users as of June this year, who collectively sent 600,000 MMS messages per month, or about six MMSes per user monthly. In comparison, the company has four million SMS (short message service) users since it launched the service towards the end of 1998. Altogether, they send 340 million SMSes each month – this is 567 times its monthly MMS volume.
Mobile content companies are following the trend, with MNC Wireless producing eight SMS applications and only one MMS application.
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post