Since the commercial operation in May of this year, the total number of subscribers is only 200,000 in 19 MVNOs, which undoubtedly shocked the industry, the chairman of bus-online (one of the MVNOs)Wang Xianshu said in a forum recently, now is the worst time for MVNOs in China.
Wang Xianshu said: "at present it is the worst time for MVNOs, but what is the problem? We can see that, in Europe and the United States, the penetration was about 40% in the whole mobile market when the MVNOs was in development stage, but right now, penetration is almost 100% in the cities of China, and some people even own 2-3 mobile phone numbers. So where can MVNOs find new markets? Therefore, I think the market environment is already poor for MVNOs in this era in China."
The second problem is the reverse of wholesale prices and retail prices, the wholesale prices are even higher than the prices that the three operators sold to the consumers, as a consequence, MVNOs have to subsidy some money in developing new subscribers; but if the prices of MVNOs are higher, why would the customers choose them? So from the mobile communication itself, the prices also restrict the development of MVNOs in China.
He said, if the reverse of wholesale prices and retail prices are solved, and build a mechanism of the formation of resale prices of enterprises and basic operators, there is still a problem of whether they can achieve large-scale development. At present, the MVNOs are not in the scale development stage yet.
As reported, MVNOs in China are expected to develop 10 million subscribers this year, but now there are only 200,000, which means that they have to develop over 3 million subscribers each month in the rest of the year, which is definitely a tough goal.
However, Wang Xianshu believes, the way for MVNOs is actually in each company’s traditional segments, and they can set up a business model through the mobile Internet strategy; providing the subscribers with free mobile communication is exactly the way to obtain subscribers, it offers more connection and means than the pure Internet companies, which can enhance the services for subscribers.