State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

This article notes that a study at Cambridge University found that 40 million adults in Europe (around 9 percent of the adult population) experience problems using mobiles, and the number of people who encounter difficulty increased with age. The elderly can often have trouble using modern mobile phone keypads.

Well, in Pakistan some of our adult population has difficulty due to many other reasons including illiteracy and unfamiliarity with gadgets.

In India people are willing to spend big money on so-called vanity or premium mobile numbers. Economic Times writes:

Guess how much will it cost to own 9999999995? Please pay Rs 15 lakh! Or if you are interested in 9855555555, then put a minimum bid of Rs 2 lakh, say mobile phone marketers. 

According to industry sources, many operators reserve some special series for politicians and bureaucrats, which are doled each time a government changes. Thus, few numbers never get released in the open market.

The craze for VIP numbers is highest in Punjab - where often the price of a VIP registration number exceeds the price of a car. Says a Hall Bazaar (Amritsar)-based mobile distributor: “Until now, the highest bid we have received is Rs 7.5 lakh for the number 9800000001. But other numbers like 9780000091 or 9780000009 can be bought for upwards of Rs 1 lakh. The series is open for sale.”

From Korea. Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics achieved the most successful quarterly results at the 3rd quarter of this year, selling 43 million and 22 million. Stock experts predict that Samsung will record KRW 16 trillion in revenue and 1.7 trillion in operating profit, a big increase from the result of the 2nd quarter, and LG will show 9 trillion in revenue and 280 billion in operating profit, offset by low sales of home appliances.

Research In Motion Ltd. reported that its quarterly revenue and profit more than doubled from a year earlier. The handset maker signaled its intention to move more aggressively into the wireless-content space, outlining a new free service called BlackBerry Unite. The desktop software will allow small groups of users like families to share content like calendars, music and documents wirelessly.

The quarter also benefited from a ramp-up of sales of the Curve, an email device with a camera and music player introduced this year that is designed to appeal to both business users and consumers.

The company captured 37% of the U.S. market for PDA and smartphone shipments in the second quarter. That was up from 33% in the second quarter of 2006 and more than double the share of its closest competitor, Palm Inc., which had 17%, according to research firm Gartner.

Skype and eBay. Among many media articles criticizing eBay, Economist writes this about the Skype write-off:

Ms Whitman does not even seem to have remembered her own lessons. In terms of the first, eBay’s “execution” in integrating Skype with its main business has been poor. Skype’s service has deteriorated: it collapsed completely for two days in August. The second lesson—bid early and high—was observed to a fault. As for the third lesson, the mistake has now been admitted, but not fixed.

Ms Whitman should have known better, because Skype became and continues to be a revolutionary technology precisely because it does not extract much revenue from its customers.

The rest of Silicon Valley has greeted Ms Whitman’s misfortunes with Schadenfreude. But the gloating may be short-lived. By buying Skype, the internet phenomenon of 2005, eBay started a bubble. Google, with its purchase of YouTube, the cyber-star of 2006, inflated it further. And Microsoft and Google now appear tempted to add more froth by investing a silly sum in Facebook, the latest big thing. All three—the internet telephone firm, the video site and the social network—make almost no money. EBay’s disappointment with Skype is a timely reminder of where this fad might lead.

Certainly, she felt pressure from Wall Street to come up with a big idea to maintain the firm’s breakneck growth. Its main business, brokering auctions, has been slowing. In the year to June, product listings on its site fell for the first time ever, by 6%. Like Yahoo!, its neighbour in Silicon Valley, eBay may be gored by Google, the ubiquitous search engine. Increasingly, people with goods to sell set up their own websites and find buyers by advertising on Google’s search pages. Google has also begun offering online payment and telephone services that compete directly with PayPal and with Skype.