While Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communication Inc (亞太行動寬頻) was celebrating its launch of the nation's first third-generation (3G) mobile services yesterday, telecom industry analysts said the high-speed mobile Internet service is not expected to become mainstream in the market in the short term.
"The migration from current mobile service to advanced 3G services is a global trend," said Jason Lin (
Lin said flatly that the chances of 3G services gaining significant popularity in Taiwan by 2005 are very low.
PHOTO: AP
Asia Pacific, a subsidiary of fixed-line phone company Eastern Broadband Telecom Co (東森寬頻), yesterday started to offer the 3G mobile phone services -- such as movie previews, video games, or real-time news reports, targeting its sales especially at young people, businesspeople and professionals.
But Asia Pacific's high 3G handset price may scare consumers away.
Currently, Asia Pacific offers customers the Samsung X789 handset for NT$20,500 and the SK Telecom AP1000 for NT$13,500, plus a two-year subscription.
"It's not necessary for me to spend more than NT$10,000 to buy a new handset and have another phone number," said Elisa Pai, 26, a Taiwan Securities Co (台証證券) employee.
"I only use my cellphone to talk and sometimes send text messages, so I don't need those fancy services," she said.
Consumers' low demand for mobile data service is the major hurdle.
"Taiwanese like to get online, but they prefer to access the Internet at home or at the office rather than on the move," Lin said.
Mobile Internet data services such as sending short messages and checking e-mail from handsets only account for 3 percent of service operators' total revenues.
"Therefore voice service will still dominant local mobile phone market for several years, though we have 3G service now," Lin added.
Meanwhile, another market analyst poured cold water on Asia Pacific yesterday, saying its plan to attract more than 700,000 users by the end of year would be a Herculean task.
"In order to reach that target, the company has to lure more than 12,000 subscribers each month from now," said Nathan Lin (林宗賢), a telecom analyst at SinoPac Securities Corp (建華證券) in Taipei.
But with the local mobile market virtually saturated, room for expansion is limited, he said.
Lin said that even Chunghwa Telecom Co (
Another factor that may hurt new subscriptions to Asia Pacific is that the company offers fixed-number handsets only, Chiao Tung University's Lin said.
Most mobile phones used in Taiwan enable users to change phone numbers by switching SIM (subscription identification module) cards, but Asia Pacific bundles each handset with a specific phone number and customers must go to an Asia Pacific service center to change numbers, he explained.
Only 23 Asia Pacific service centers have been set up around the nation.
"The inconvenience will lower its attractiveness, because people like to use new handsets but to retain the same numbers," Lin said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS