Private capital breaks ice telecommunication industry

The mobile resale service officially opened. On December 26th, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology formally issued the pilot approvals for the first batch of mobile communication resale services (ie, "virtual operators"). The 11 companies that got the first batch of licenses included telephone world, online sharing, Wanwang, and music language communications. .

Previously rumors such as Gome and Suning were not listed here. A Suning employee who did not wish to be named revealed to the reporter of “Daily Economic News” that the virtual operator “is still behind”. The employee also revealed that several employees of Suning are currently waiting in Beijing to follow up on this matter and advance the application for approval. If no accident, Suning will be included in the list next week, together with the announcement may also have Aishide, Gome and other giants.

At the same time as the issuance of license plates, it also opened a market with a scale of approximately 30 billion yuan. Many people in the industry told the Daily Economic News reporter that the key to obtaining the cake lies in differentiated services. However, because these companies lack experience, they still need to continue to explore.

Mobile phone channel players

More than half of the first companies to obtain virtual operator licenses are traditional mobile channel providers. Yi Yi Consulting CEO Zhang Yi believes that there is a deep market behind this. A close-to-high-level employee of Dixon told the reporter of “Daily Economic News” that the approval process of virtual operators is different from that of the general communication business. These enterprises first sign cooperation agreements with operators to apply for virtual services. Operator license. Under such circumstances, companies that have been in close contact with operators have naturally had an advantage to sign this agreement. Relatively speaking, operators can more clearly understand the internal conditions of these traditional generations and channels, so it is easier. Give authorization.

“Traditional channel distributors and state-owned merchants have a close relationship with the SIM card sales of the operator in terms of mobile phone sales. Enterprises that have previously done SIM card sales have comparative advantages.” The aforementioned employees explained that this was the first batch of licensed players. The reasons for more mobile phone channel providers.

According to reports, all the agreements signed by the virtual operators with the operators are the same, and the negotiations are also very market-oriented. Both parties have a large team to carry out all aspects of the docking. The agreement stipulates that as long as the business conforms to the policies of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology can be done, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology prohibits the operators from doing it, and the virtual operator cannot do it.

"Apart from the absence of a physical network, everything else is basically the same. Only overseas roaming services are currently undefined. At present, traditional operators overseas roaming are losing money. For virtual operators, this is precisely the opportunity to make money. Because currently This piece of business for foreign companies doing virtual operators has done a very good job." Suning employees said.

It is understood that the above-mentioned licensed enterprises will be able to rent mobile telecom operators' mobile communications networks to provide users with brand-based communications services. The communication services specifically include: re-combination of short messages, voices, and traffic for a more flexible package to be sold to users; sales of SIM cards; and development of value-added services such as voice mail and short message service.

Make money from value-added services

It is understood that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has no restrictions on the number of private enterprises participating in the trial of mobile communication resale business, and the application for trial acceptance will end in July 2014. As long as the company has reached the corresponding threshold, it can apply, and it is a qualified one and publishes one.

Zhang Yi believes that from the perspective of state-owned enterprises, the basic operators are reluctant to change. They do not want to have the challenge in the market. The price war between virtual operators and traditional operators is the situation they are most afraid of.

However, according to the agreement, it is impossible for virtual operators to fight price wars with traditional operators because the control of cost price is not in their hands. All virtual operators who want to make money must rely on value-added services. "Virtual operators cannot expect to earn money for calls. Value-added services are the source of profits. For example, users can be very subdivided. They can combine different ages, hobbies, etc., and combine with the mobile Internet to form a variety of combination packages. At present, we have our own. The APP and its applications will create user stickiness. We can make personalized packages based on their RUP values. For virtual operators, it is easier to do accurate marketing.” The aforementioned Dixon employees told reporters.

In addition to the traditional mobile channel providers, Gome and Suning have made strategic attempts to do virtual operators because of their precise marketing. The Suning employees mentioned above stated that “Specialized resale is not profitable. We may combine our own strengths and may pay more attention to the cloud platform, cross-subsidies online and offline, such as offline purchase of a refrigerator, we can convert the points into credits. ”

“Suning has real estate, bank licenses, bank cards, residential access control cards, can be integrated into the communication card, into a cash flow and promotion channels. We want to do precision marketing has been more than enough power. With a communication card, smart family Integration with the smart community life platform in the ERP, it is easy to achieve a variety of benefits, sales subsidies, real-time application of big data, precision marketing.”

30 billion market size can be expected

This is also the first time in the field of mobile communications to the public capital. Many private enterprises are full of expectations for this business, and this cake of mobile resale business is also very large.

Tao Xujun, deputy director of the communications strategy department of Nomura Research Institute, told the reporter of “Daily Economic News” that at present, South Korea’s mobile service resellers have occupied about 5% of the user’s market share after more than three years of development. According to public statistics, the developed markets in Europe and North America, where the telecommunications market is relatively open, account for about 7% to 10% of the market share of virtual operators.

The communications market report released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that as of the end of October, the total number of mobile phone users in China reached 1.216 billion, accounting for 81.9% of the total number of telephone users. Among them, the total number of 3G users reached 379 million, and the penetration rate of mobile phone users reached 31.2%.

Tao Xujun said that if according to the current 5% customer market share of South Korea's mobile resellers, China’s mobile resellers will receive approximately 60 million users in the future. According to the results reported by the three major operators, the current ARPU (average monthly household income) is between 50 and 70 yuan, so the market scale of future mobile resale business will have a market of 30 billion yuan to 42 billion yuan. scale.

In June of this year, the research report of Deloitte management consulting also predicted that the market space of China Mobile's mobile resale business will be at least RMB 30 billion.

Differentiating special services into key

Although the cake in the mobile resale market is tempting, it is not so easy to eat. "Southern Metropolis Daily" reported that operators currently use 70% off prices to send text messages and flow tariffs to the virtual operators. The SMS settlement price is 7 cents/bar, the flow rate is 120 yuan/G, and the voice tariff is 0.1. Yuan/minute.

However, this price has almost no competitiveness compared with the existing package tariffs of the three major operators. This has caused many people to shout "unable to play." Fu Liang, an independent telecom analyst, said in an interview with the reporter of the “Daily Economic News” that mobile resellers are unlikely to get extremely favorable rates, and that simply relying on mobile resale business to earn the difference, it must be only “hard-won money”. , It is possible that not only can not earn money, but also lose money, it is recommended that companies target the target group, launch feature services, and dig the first barrel of gold.

Zhao Guoqing, Vice Chairman of Jingdong Group, stated that JD.com will repackage the mobile communication services of the basic operators and build JD’s own telecom business services such as voice, SMS, MMS, and mobile data packages to meet the needs of different types of users and promote the entire The development of the telecom service market.

However, the introduction of differentiated and distinctive services is not easy for companies that have acquired mobile resale services because there is no such experience. Therefore, news of mobile resellers digging people from the three major operators continued to spread during this period.

Gu Jianbing, director of public relations at Alibaba Group, told reporters that after obtaining a license, companies do not want to simply do a resale business, but rather want to provide services to users through innovative methods, but it is not easy to achieve this goal. Gu Jianbing said that some package designs have been made, but it is not convenient to disclose them.

An industry source said that in contact with some companies applying for licenses, it was discovered that some companies did not know much about differentiated services, but simply wanted to obtain licenses. After all, Chinese licenses are scarce resources. Perhaps two years later, it was found that the industry did not make money and it was possible to sell the license.