Vivo
It’s taken me awhile to post this, but here’s are my notes from comments made at the 2003 BREW Developers Conference by Roger Sole, a manager with Vivo, the new brand name for the largest mobile operator in Brazil. I found it very interesting that Vivo achieved some major revenue successes without alot of technology, in a country where mobile phones are still something of a luxury due to expense.
Here are some interesting numbers Roger shared:
- Vivo enjoys 50% market share in Brazil
- 17M subscribers (this means there are only 34M people using mobile phones in a country of about 170M - a 20% mobile phone take rate)
- The company (a merger between Telefonica and Portugal Telecom) launched under the Vivo brand name in an effort to avoid the state monopoly image of its parent companies
- the company doubled revenues from 2001 to 2002, impressively. Sole credited SMS and WAP Push campaigns for this growth, explaining that 50% of their handsets are SMS-capable, and 40% of the can handle WAP.
- 7% of total outgoing ARPU on SMS and WAP
- Used WAP Push campaign during the World Cup
- Enterprise: the company has 12,000 customers using laptops and PDAs with cdma2000 cards (data only)
- They do offer a Mobile Office application over WAP, giving corporate users access to email, schedule, and contact information
- They offer a Sales Force Automation application
- Customers include AmBev, Coca Cola, Visanet, Folha
- “Adult content” is one content area they expect to offer
- Price plans are usually subscription-based, about $R6 per month (adult content gets $10R monthly, even more than office and translator applications)
- Data prices are $R 0.03/KB postpaid, or $R 0.02/KB prepaid on 1xRTT network, or $R 0.42/minute on the 2G network
- Vivo is currently operating a hybrid network (CDMA, GSM), but are looking to migrate this to CDMA over time
I found it interesting that Vivo was able to increase revenues by a factor of two with smart marketing, even in a country where there is less disposable income, on average, than most developed markets.