Tuesday, June 24, 2008 Smart gets 2008 mobile operator award
SMART Communications, the country's leading wireless provider, said the low-income segment of the Philippines' population helps boost their profitability.
Napoleon Nazareno, president of Smart Communications, said in accepting the Mobile Operator for The Year 2008 award in Singapore in its 15 years of operations, Smart has "led the way in putting mobile phones in the hands of more Filipinos than was previously thought possible by virtually all industry analysts."
The award was given by the Asian Mobile News, a leading cellular industry magazine in Asia, which organizes the annual awards for the top mobile operators and handsets in Asia.
It was the second time that Smart was recognized as the country's mobile operator of the year, having first received the award during the Asian Mobile News Awards 2005.
"We've done this through world-first innovations that enabled us to sell profitably to people whose low income levels had previously excluded from using cellular phones," he added.
Recalling the late 1990s, where industry analysts believed that mobile phone penetration in the Philippines could not exceed 20-25 percent on account of the country's relatively low per capita incomes, Nazareno noted that it has been reversed since as of end-2007, over 60 percent of Filipinos had become mobile phone users.
Nazareno attributed the Philippines' success in promoting the usage of mobile phones to the introduction of various innovations in cellular technologies and business models.
He further noted that the introduction of prepaid services in the 1990s, which Smart has aggressively promoted helped a lot.
"This innovation opened the door to just everyone - students, housewives, employees, blue-collar workers, farmers, fishermen and families of overseas worker," he said.
Prepaid services were further enhanced when Smart introduced micro-tops through electronic loads - or Smart Load - in 2003.
The sachet size of airtime tops in Smart Load - now as low as P10 per load - has made mobile phone services affordable for many more low-income subscribers. At the same time, emergency load or e-load has helped drive down the cost of providing mobile services, thus enabling Smart to profitably serve the low-income market.
Aside from the prepaid packages, Nazareno said the company's investments in information technology (IT) has led to the development of prepaid and mobile commerce platforms that has allowed Smart to offer services that address the needs of the different segments of its subscriber base.
These include service packages that offer various combinations of text and voice call offers, more affordable and convenient remittance services in partnership with leading and reputable banks here and abroad, and more affordable and widely available broadband Internet access services.
At present, Smart and Talk 'N Text has combined total subscribers of 32.6 million as of end May 2008 or an additional of 2.6 million users.
The company is also projecting a growth in their subscribers of 1.4 million to 1.5 million in the second quarter. (MSN/Sunnex)
