Passage 3 Mobile Marvels
电信业在新兴市场上迅猛发展 《经济学人》2009-9-24 052

[00:01]Mobile marvels
[00:03]Bouncing a great-grandchild on her knee in her house in Bukaweka,
[00:09]a village in eastern Uganda, Mary Wokhwale gestures at her surroundings.
[00:16]“My mobile phone has been my livelihood,” she says.
[00:20]In 2003 Ms Wokhwale was one of the first 15 women in Uganda to become
[00:27]“village phone” operators. Thanks to a microfinance loan,
[00:32]she was able to buy a basic handset and a roof-
[00:35]mounted antenna to ensure a reliable signal.
[00:39]She went into business selling phone calls to other villagers,
[00:44]making a small profit on each call. This enabled her to pay back her loan
[00:51]and buy a second phone.
[00:53]The income from selling phone calls subsequently enabled her
[00:57]to set up a business selling beer, open a music and video shop
[01:03]and help members of her family pay their children’s school fees.
[01:09]Business has declined somewhat in the past couple of years as mobile phones
[01:14]have fallen in price and many people in her village can afford their own.
[01:20]But Ms Wokhwale’s life has been transformed.
[01:24]Ms Wokhwale prospered because being able to make and receive phone calls
[01:30]is so important to people that even the very poor are prepared to pay for it.
[01:36]In places with bad roads, unreliable postal services, few trains
[01:41]and dangerous transportation, mobile phones can substitute for travel,
[01:47]allow quicker and easier access to information on prices,
[01:52]enable traders to reach wider markets, boost entrepreneurship
[01:58]and generally make it easier to do business.
[02:02]A study by the World Resources Institute found that as developing-
[02:07]world incomes rise, household spending on mobile phones grows faster
[02:12]than spending on energy, water or indeed anything else.
[02:17]The reason why mobile phones are so valuable to people in the poor world
[02:23]is that they are providing access to telecommunications for the very first time,
[02:28]rather than just being portable adjuncts to existing fixed-
[02:32]line phones, as in the rich world. “For you it was additional—
[02:37]here it’s revolutionary,”
[02:39]says Isaac Nsereko of MTN, Africa’s biggest operator.
[02:45]According to a recent study, adding an extra ten mobile phones
[02:51]per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts growth in GDP per person
[02:58]by 0.8 percentage points.
[03:01]In 2000 developing countries accounted for around one-quarter
[03:06]of the world’s 700 million or so mobile phones.
[03:10]By the beginning of 2009 their share had grown to three-quarters of a total
[03:16]which by then had risen to over 4 billion.
[03:21]That does not mean that 4 billion people now have mobile phones,
[03:26]because many in both rich and poor countries own several handsets
[03:31]or subscriber-identity module (SIM) cards,
[03:36]the tiny chips that identify a subscriber to a mobile network.
[03:42]Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chief executive of Ericsson,
[03:47]the world’s largest maker of telecoms-network equipment,
[03:51]believes that the actual number of people
[03:55]with mobile phones is closer to 3.6 billion.
[03:59]But exact numbers are hard to get,
[04:03]mainly because of the continued rapid growth
[04:05]in the global number of subscribers.
[04:09]In the year to March 2009 an additional 128 million signed up in India,
[04:16]89 million in China and 96 million across Africa, according to TeleGeography,
[04:24]a telecoms consultancy. Numbers in Indonesia, Vietnam,
[04:31]Brazil and Russia also grew rapidly. China is the world’s largest market
[04:39]for mobile telecommunication, with over 700 million subscribers.
[04:45]India is adding the biggest number each month: 15.6 million in March alone.
[04:52]And Africa is the region with the fastest rate of subscriber growth.
[04:59]With developed markets now saturated, the developing world’s rural poor
[05:04]will account for most of the growth in the coming years.
[05:08]The total will reach 6 billion by 2013, according to the GSMA,
[05:15]an industry group, with half of these new users in China and India alone.
[05:21]All this is transforming the telecoms industry.
[05:26]Within just a few years its centre of gravity has shifted from the developed
[05:31]to the developing countries. The biggest changes are taking place
[05:35]in the poorest parts of the world, such as rural Uganda.
[05:40]Three trends in particular are reshaping the telecoms landscape.
[05:45]First, the spread of mobile phones in developing countries
[05:50]has been accompanied by the rise of home-grown mobile operators in China,
[05:56]India, Africa and the Middle East that rival
[06:00]or exceed the industry’s Western counterparts in size.
[06:05]These operators have developed new business models
[06:08]and industry structures that enable them to make a profit serving
[06:12]low-spending customers that Western firms would not bother with.
[06:17]Indian operators have led the way, and some aspects of the
[06:22]“Indian model” are now being adopted by operators in other countries,
[06:28]both rich and poor. This model provides new opportunities,
[06:34]especially for Indian operators. The spread of the Indian model
[06:39]could help bring mobile phones
[06:42]within reach of an even larger number of the world’s poor.
[06:47]The second trend is the emergence
[06:50]of China’s two leading telecoms-equipment-
[06:52]makers, Huawei and ZTE,
[06:56]which have entered the global stage in the past five years.
[07:01]Initially dismissed as low-cost, low-quality producers,
[07:05]they now have a growing reputation for quality and innovation,
[07:10]prompting a shake-out among the current Western equipment-makers.
[07:15]The most recent victim was Nortel,
[07:18]once Canada’s most valuable company,
[07:21]which went bankrupt in January.
[07:23]Having long concentrated on emerging markets,
[07:27]Huawei and ZTE are well placed to expand their market share
[07:33]as subscriber numbers continue to grow
[07:37]and networks are upgraded from second-
[07:39]generation (2G) to third-generation (3G) technology,
[07:45]notably in China and India.
[07:48]The third trend is the development of new phone-based services,
[07:53]beyond voice calls and basic text messages,
[07:55]which are now becoming feasible
[07:58]because mobile phones are relatively widely available.
[08:02]In rich countries most such services have revolved around trivial things
[08:08]like music downloads and mobile gaming. In poor countries data services
[08:14]such as mobile-phone-based agricultural advice,
[08:18]health care and money transfer could provide enormous economic
[08:24]and developmental benefits. Beyond that, mobile networks
[08:29]and low-cost computing devices are poised to
[08:33]offer the benefits of full internet
[08:36]access to people in the developing world in the coming years.
[08:40] The special report will examine each of these three trends in turn.
[08:46]Each one is significant in itself but also has consequences for rich
[08:52]as well as poor countries. Together they could start a second wave of mobile-
[08:59]led economic development as powerful as that prompted
[09:04]by the original launch of mobile phones.
[09:07]Their spread in poor countries is not just reshaping the industry—
[09:12]it is changing the world.