SouthAsiaBiz: Do you think that American companies are missing out on a great opportunity in the South Asian mobile phone market as we do not find too much involvement from US companies here?
R. Brough Turner: Yes! Most of the growth in telecommunications over the next decade will be in emerging markets like Asia, Latin America and Africa. All of the global telecom equipment providers (e.g. Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Motorola and the like) recognize this and are aligning their businesses accordingly. Whether it's telecom equipment sales to developing markets or investment in telecom operators in developing markets, the lead seems to go to Europe, or to new money sources like the Middle East and new equipment sources like China (Huawei, ZTE & UT Starcom).
Part of the issue in the US may be that our mobile growth lagged that of Europe (US mobile teledensity was ~ 70 in December 2005), so we are still in a high growth phase. There's also a lot of competition, a lot of money being spent and tons of new services being tried out in North America which may distract people from the opportunities in South Asia.
In any event, there is increasing interest in developing markets here in the US, so I think you'll see more American companies showing up. Certainly, emerging markets are a big focus for NMS Communications.
SouthAsiaBiz: The mobile companies are creating a huge job market. If the youth of the country wants to join the telecom industry in North America what kind of expertise they should gain?
R. Brough Turner : My best recommendation would be a technical education followed by business experience and/or a business degree, but that's partly a personal bias. Certainly a strong technical background is a good way to get a job and a visa to work in the US or Canada.
SouthAsiaBiz: Please tell us something about your company and its involvement with the telecom sector of Asia.
NMS Communications focuses on mobile telecom. We have both enabling technology for enhanced services and complete application platforms for specific mobile applications. Typical of our enabling technology is the Vision line of communications servers -- audio and video media servers, video gateways, video transcoders and signaling servers, all aimed at simplifying life for application developers and reducing their time-to-market.
In the ringback tone market, Ericsson sells our MyCaller system -- a complete ringback tone platform -- as the Ericsson Personal Greeting Service. But we also supply media servers, media processing and signaling components and software to many of the other providers of ringback tone platforms including Comverse, Widerthan.com, ECT, Alcatel and Lucent, so our technology is very widely deployed. Of course ringback tones originated in Asia where the first systems were created by SK Telecom in Korea, using a platform that incorporated NMS technology.
Another product line that's particularly relevant in Asia is our AccessGate bandwidth optimizer. AccessGate reduces the cost of backhauling traffic from cellsites to the mobile switching center. In the past 12 months we've seen widespread adoption for rural cellsites in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Asia is a high growth market for NMS. Our products are usually delivered to telecom service providers through systems integrators, application developers and major equipment providers. Today over a quarter of our sales are direct to Asian companies, plus a substantial portion of our sales to major equipment providers in Europe and the US are for use in systems that are sold in Asia.
We have NMS sales offices and sales engineering in Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul and New Delhi. We also have distribution partners all over Asia and products deployed in most Asian countries. Finally we have a major business and product development center in Bangalore.
SouthAsiaBiz: How would you compare the growth in telecom sector of India and China?
R. Brough Turner : Obviously China is ahead in absolute numbers as they have been growing fairly rapidly for some years. Recently, India's mobile growth rates have approached China's mobile growth rates and exceeded the rate at which mobile services in China were growing when China was at a comparable teledensity approximately five years ago. However, to understand telecom in China you have to look at both the official mobile operators (China Mobile and China Unicom) and the wireless local loop and limited mobility services provided by China Netcom, China Telecom and China TieTong.
If you compare the sum of all operators and all services in each country, China is way ahead in absolute numbers (teledensity over 55) and still ahead in growth rate. It's unfortunate, but India continues to tax it's telecom sector as rates much higher than China (or most other countries in Asia). India also has a shortage of spectrum and overly regulated approach to rural coverage. However, India is an open society that is actively discussing telecom policy. Hopefully accurate comparisons with telecom in China or Pakistan will help lead to policy changes and even faster growth of telecom in India.
yes i myself agree with southasiabiz writer that american companies missing out on great opportunities on southasia mobile phone sector.
in shopping mall crowd gather only mobile phone floor. its hard to walk becoz each and every mobile shop people stuck like bees in honey.every minute shop owners selling new mobile set.
Posted by: Anonymous | June 25, 2006 9:57 PM | Permalink to Comment