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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (53934)	5/3/2003 11:36:54 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

BREW data... Verizon hasnt provided quite as much data on how their BREW services has done as PCS has with Vision. Most of the info that I have been able to find came from last weeks BREW developer conference where they outlined some statistics. Verizon doesnt charge an access fee for BREW services so it is hard to give an exact comparision to PCS. Verizon has provided the following numbers. Total BREW Total Downloads/ Handset Sales BREW Downloads Handset Dec 31st 1.5 million 2.7 million 1.8 Mar 31st 3.2 million 8.5 million 2.7 They are predicting 8 million total BREW handsets deployed by the end of '03. This number actually seems a little low since it would represent a slowdown from the 1.7 million BREW handset sales rate during the first quarter. Verizon calculates a $7.50 data ARPU associated with "active" BREW users. Unfortunately, they havent defined exactly how many BREW users are considered active. However, one of the interesting trends that Verizon has seen is that BREW users get MORE active as time goes by. This is tremondously important for the carriers. It wont mean very much if users buy a couple of applications when they first get the handset and then fail to upgrade to new programs. While I think that thus far I would say that Verizon has been less successful than PCS in their wireless data initiative...one reason could be the lack of handsets with embedded cameras. PCS is seeing an average of 15 picture messages being sent by customers with embedded cameras. Verizon plans on launching handsets/applications in July. I would expect to see a greater takeup/usage when these hit the market. One area where both Verizon and PCS have failed miserably is in location based services. Neither is taking advantage of the built-in GPS features that most new handsets have. While both have promised to launch these services later this year, it is extremely hard to see why they have been so slow. Nextel and ATT Wireless have actually been the innovators in this area. Looking at the overall trends I am increasingly confident that wireless data is going to be become a significant portion of overall revenues for carriers in '04 (>5%). There arent going to be any gorilla game opportunities in the operator category in the US (Docomo has done some interesting things in Japan), but if things play out as I see them, we could start to see a justification for additional capex to be spent on wireless networks (read 3G). As Eric has pointed out, the deployment of W-CDMA has seen two hurdles, one technical and one financial. I believe the technical hurdle will inevitably be worked out....I am hoping that the same is true of the financial hurdle. Slacker