There is one player here in the big game that hasn’t contributed that much, and that’s government. The obvious things like taxation, duties have been mentioned many times. This isn’t a lot of researching, it’s more implementing on the government side. What does access to spectrum mean? It means a great deal.
-Hans Wijeyasuriya and Dumindra Ratnayake on the Asian market and the bottom of the pyramid Its not the financial crisis that has reduced profits in South Asia. Sri Lanka is a very good case study. This happened because policy makers did not understand the market. We have one too many operators. Our base stations have too long payback times.
Divakara Goswami (Chair): I’m at Deloitte and we try to find the ROI on our research. One thing we’ve found that works is doing a survey on our research. The question that I have for you is, what is the research LIRNEasia has done that can be useful to you? I’m Sanna Eskelinen from Nokia, Emerging Markets. I think it is easy for me because Rohan thinks about making himself redundant.
Harsha de Silva: Kentaro, you talked about the expenditure and ringtones, but this whole group answered vacation or new car (also new car). That doesn’t seem to be a BOP thing. Helani, you talked about prepaid, but that’s 95%, so not necessarily BOP. So is there anything that’s BOP specific? Sultanur Reza: CSR, people have different expectations.
What we know The BOP is a large group of people, we know they have low income. They can only spend a limited amount on communication. Their income is also irregular. So they can’t spend at a constant rate. We know they have phones.
I am currently based in Bangalore India, but as you can tell I’m not Indian. There’s some things which I don’t understand emotionally, though I do understand intellectually. For example, singing in the rain is an exception in Hollywood, but it’s the norm in Bollywood. I can’t muster the same joy at the rains, but the entire country gets a bonus when it rains on time. There’s a huge difference, based on a similarity.
– Sulatnur Reza, GrameenPhone, Bangladesh The BOP are the people that make up the base of the pyramid. Therefore i like to refer to them as the base of the pyramid and not the bottom. At 5.3. bn people, its a huge potential market.
I want to talk about not the demand side so much as the supply side. How we’re going to reach BOP users, and how much it will cost, and whether private sector can do this. If you look at the side, you can see that more than 3/4 of mobile users are from developing countries. Some developing countries are beginning to leapfrog OECD counterparts. The level of economic development is not necessarily a good predictor of how a country will do.
In a study conducted among 579 million people in emerging Asia it was discovered that people are reluctant to use these services because they seem too complicated. Most people tend to download ringtones etc from their PCs and then transfer them to their mobiles. Cost is also a factor that limits Mobile 2.0 applications from being used on a mass scale. Prerequisites such as ‘more than voice’ mobile phones exist.
Understanding people at the bottom of the pyramid and targeting them in a business and telecom sense is important. Communication and information produce positive benefits to poor people, and there is evidence to prove this. But there are also negatives to this. Communication info can communicate to economic well being. It also contributes substantially to people’s personal well being and to capability building and human development.
I think cell broadcasting is a good technology for reaching that last mile. We’re not very good at getting up to speed in the States. They probably figured they’d have time to incorporate cell technology into the existing warning systems. They haven’t, but perhaps becuase they don’t feel it’s as urgent. I’m glad Nuwan brought up this problem with regards to the mass media.
The projects that Nuwan worked on were on first responder warning. Our first foray into public warning was in the Maldives. You can see from the Maldives, there’s very good mobile coverage. At the peak tourists amount to 1/5th of the population. In the Maldives there was great property damage in the Malidives.
We are the first highly personalized professional information service for farmers. RML has over 170,000 subscribers across 12,000 villages. By one estimate RML might have reached up to a million farmers. This is because farmers don’t consumer the information by themselves but share it with 8-12 other farmers. They say that it’s information, and it gives me a different status in the village (to share).
More coverage on LBO of the proceedings of the LIRNEasia@5 conference: “The biggest contribution from research is not what is adopted, but what is adopted,” says Bill Melody, founding director of World Dialog on Regulation for Network Economies. “Harmful policies that are avoided with the information generated from research.” R K Arnold the head of the executive secretariat of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India says all its recommendation is based on extensive but decisions are not “We used a (LirneAsia) research on a tax and the government reduced the tax. In infrastructure sharing we drawn heavily on your research,” Arnold said. “But whether the decision makers use it at the top depends on a very fluid situation.
Anjani Sinha, MD National Spot Exchange, India: National Spot Exchange’s objective is to reduce cost of intermediaries and enable farmers to sell directly to consumers. When the farmer harvests they can bring produce to our warehouse. A receipt is issued to him. He can then sell immediately to us, and electronic negotiation will happen. Buyers anywhere in the country can see the price and bid.
For any market to succeed it needs to be efficient. Transaction costs in this part of the world in agri markets are very high. It is the information search cost that has caused this. ICT must step in here and reduce the cost of obtaining information; allowing farmers to have more access to information and ultimately enable farmers to participate more actively in market activity. Many attempts have been made at reducing the info search cost.