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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: djane who wrote (7105)	9/1/1999 11:07:00 AM
From: djane	Respond to of 29987

Emerging Markets Drive Cellular Growth Worldwide - Report September 1, 1999 (via G* yahoo thread) Top>Business & Finance>Investments>Sectors>Services>Communications Services>GSTRF (Globalstar Telecommun.) Emerging Markets Drive Cellular Growth by: dskdrv1 (M/Your CPU) 11293 of 11295 Emerging Markets Drive Cellular Growth Worldwide - Report September 1, 1999 LONDON, ENGLAND, Newsbytes via NewsEdge Corporation : Growth in the developing or emerging markets is driving cellular user growth even higher than experts had predicted, a study from the Strategis Group says. The effect of the emerging markets growth was pronounced in the second quarter of this year, the report says. In Africa, sales growth actually exceeded 20 percent during the quarter. The quarterly report, entitled "Strategis DataBank: World Cellular/PCS Subscribers and Operators," found that Latin America and Eastern Europe followed Africa, both with 16 percent growth rates. On a global level, worldwide cellular/PCS subscribers grew by 11 percent during the second quarter, reaching 385 million users. As expected, the report found that TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) subscriber levels demonstrated the strongest quarterly gains, growing 20 percent and 18 percent respectively. GSM (aka PCS in the US), however, the report found, was still the world's dominant standard, with 61 percent of the global subscriber base as at the end of the second quarter. Not unexpectedly, Europe remains the leading GSM market, accommodating 9 of the top 10 GSM service providers worldwide. Italian operators Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) and Omnitel are the frontrunners, the report says, accounting for almost seven percent of the world's GSM subscribers as at the end of the second quarter. Oksana Falenchuk, an analyst with The Strategis Group's UK/European offices, said that prepaid has become the driving force in European cellular growth in recent times, with Italy being one of the top prepaid markets. Falenchuk told Newsbytes that the two main Italian operators, TIM and Omnitel, have combined prepaid subscriber levels of 15 million and, during the second quarter, 90 percent of new subscribers to the Italian networks were prepaid. In June of this year, Strategis published a key report on the Latin American cellular marketplace that tracked similar moves with prepaid in that region. According to that report, entitled "Prepaid Cellular/PCS in Latin America: Market Potential and Business Strategies," at the end of 1998, prepaid cellular accounted for 16 percent of total Latin American cellular/PCS subscribers. The report said that, with careful pricing strategies, prepaid captures low usage subscribers who cannot afford contract service. While prepaid users tend to generate lower ARPU (average revenues per user) than contract subscribers, acquisition and other operating costs for prepaid users are also significantly less. The report said that by matching lower revenue subscribers to lower cost services, operators can maintain or extend profit margins. In addition, rapid prepaid subscriber growth tends to offset declining ARPUs, so producing increasing total service revenue for an operator. Michael Krier, a spokesperson for the firm, said by lowering the effective cost of cellular and providing for usage and spending flexibility, prepaid service can expand the addressable market for cellular by between 200 and 300 percent. Posted: 9/1/1999 10:55 am EDT as a reply to: Msg 11291 by deepdana