2015 is a crucial year for MVNOs in China. Judging by the current development situation of MVNOs, it seems not satisfactory. Half of the year has passed, and how is the development of MVNOs? What problems exist and how will the MVNOs develop in the second half of 2015?
Performance: half of the MVNOs have launched business with 6 million subscribers in total
In 2014, MIIT issued 42 licenses to MVNOs. By May of 2015, 21 MVNOs have launched relevant business, which accounted for half of the MVNOs. The vice chairman of CACE and chairman of the Virtual Operation branch Miao Jianhua said, MVNOs must launch relevant business by the end of 2015, otherwise they will not pass the assessment. Therefore, more MVNOs will launch business in the second half of 2015.
In terms of the number of subscribers, it has been growing rapidly since March 2015, at present, that number has reached 6 million. He affirmed the performance that MVNOs have achieved, he said, MVNOs payed high attention to the industry order ever since the early stage, which was certainly worth recognition. At the same time, the innovative vitalities that MVNOs bring also worth learning by the traditional operators.
Problems: subscribers changed rapidly, ARPU was only of 13 yuan
Although MVNOs have been trying hard, the development situation was far from satisfactory, for this phenomenon, Miao Jianhua said that two major issues were very tough:
First, subscribers of MVNOs changed rapidly and the churn rate was high. He believed that this only made personal profit for the channel staffs, but very unhelpful for the development of MVNOs.
Second, the overall ARPU was too low. The average ARPU of MVNOs was only 13 yuan, if take off the enterprise subscribers that have high value, the average ARPU of public subscribers was less than 10 yuan. Miao Jianhua said that it was reasonable for the ARPU of virtual subscribers to be 30 to 50 yuan, there would be no profit if it was less than 10 yuan".
Appeal: number porting is very important, value-added services should be opened
Faced with the unsatisfying development, MVNOs also expressed their appeals. The CEO of Soshare Kang Zhibin said that one big problem that affected the development of MVNOs was number porting, which was very important for MVNOs. If the subscribers cannot use their virtual numbers as the first ones, the impact would be great. The MVNOs hope that their subscribers would use their number as the first one.
Meanwhile, Kang Zhibin said that domestic MVNOs were really virtual, they are very weak in the network side. For example, the CRBT service was very difficult to carry out in virtual operation. He believed that the traditional operators have done very well in the simple resale business, he hoped that the basic operators could provide value-added services to MVNOs. For MVNOs, it would bring more opportunities in this field if the value added business were opened.
Future: key indicators would be disclosed in the second half of 2015
In order to deal with the problem that MVNOs faced and promote the development of MVNOs, Miao Jianhua said that they will carries on the statistics, analysis and disclosure of the 42 virtual operation enterprises in 2H2015, which would be used as the reference for relevant information. The information would be more comprehensive, including the growth rates and churn rates of subscribers, complaint rate, ARPU value, etc.
In fact, the industry hopes that MVNOs could obtain better development, so that they can bring more choices for the users and force the progress of traditional operators.