COMPETITION and regulatory pressures may be increasing but Vodafone clearly believes there is still everything to play for in mobile telephony and the stock market appears to agree.
Mobiles may appear irritatingly omnipresent but only 16% of the adult population has one, which is only about half the proportion in, for example, Sweden.
Perish the thought, but
Vodafone believes about half the population will have a mobile by 2005, with the market able to absorb growth of 5% a year.
The group is signing up customers at three times the rate of a year ago, net of cancellations.
Penetration so far is skewed towards the more affluent and there are fears that margins will be squeezed as lower-spending customers sign on. But so far this has not happened, although
pressure on tariffs is bound to continue, given competition and falling fixed-line prices.
However, other premium services are coming along, notably the new-generation mobile licence, universal mobile telecoms system - which will allow high speed Internet access - quality video-conferencing and home shopping over a mobile.
Three to five licences are expected to be up for auction by the Government next June. Unless Vodafone does something stupid it should get one of the licences, although it will mean capital spending of #200m a year to set up.
The group has a wide spread of interests overseas which are now delivering. But it hopes to go further through more acquisitions and is looking in the
Pacific Rim, Africa and western Europe.
The goal is to make #1000m profits a year by 1999-2000, with about a third coming from overseas. This is ambitious but looks achievable given a fair wind.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article