Mobile News

Mobile phone markets in Asia Pacific have been influenced by existing and new prepaid services in a number of ways. Countries with less technologically developed cellular markets and low penetration rates, such as Indonesia and India, have benefited from prepaid services. Following the economic crisis, the prepaid option has enabled customers to continue to use a mobile without high running costs.

The region’s overall mobile market growth remained level in 2007 and 2008. However, the growth of prepaid has been dramatic and, by end-2008, over one-third of the region’s mobile customers were prepaid users.

The mature markets, such as Australia and Hong Kong, are re-thinking their strategies, including those for prepaid versus postpaid. They are paying the price of active competition for customers using cut-price tariffs and expensive marketing campaigns. Some operators in these regions are no longer chasing market share and are instead concentrating on improving services to existing customers in an attempt to raise ARPUs that were badly hit by this type of competition. Other countries in the region have always resisted prepaid, Japan in particular, and there is still a relatively small proportion of prepaid users there.

At end-December 2008, China had the highest number of prepaid users in the region  152.2 million, between China Mobile (128.7 million) and China Unicom (25.5 million). To put this in perspective, this was still less than 20% of the total mobile customer base. China is expected to be the most significant market for prepaid in the future, simply because of the sheer size of its population.