Asia Pacific says it's a contender

Taipei Times: Asia Pacific Broad-band Wireless Communications Inc (亞太行動寬頻) launched its third-generation (3G) services on July 29. What strategies does your company have to carve out a bigger slice of the pie from this highly competitive market?

An Chung-ming (安仲明): Right now, most mobile services are very popular and almost everyone has a mobile phone in their hand. But people are primarily relying on regular calling services. What we at Asia Pacific believe is that a mobile phone should not be simply a device for voice communications: it should become a functional tool complementing your daily life by, for example, offering video services.

In fact, most people would have difficulty living without their mobile handsets even now. Based on this premise, with 3G technology we will be able to offer a wide array of services very different from what other mobile operators can offer.

We think 3G will grow in popularity because discerning customers always seek better services which they can easily use. Therefore, our easy-to-use interface and rich content are the two major factors which will allow us to break into the market.

TT: What do you mean by rich content, specifically?

An: With current mobile technology, users have access to many data services, such as games and ring-tones or picture downloads. Still, all of this is either text-based or still-picture based content.

We, however, in addition to offering the same content, also offer video-based content. Because of the freedom video gives us, we can design a vast array of different services. For example, we offer movie previews. Users can download movie clips from our network server directly to their handsets to watch, anytime. We also offer TV news. In fact, we are even now working in coordination with three TV stations, meaning that within two or three hours of production, the TV news programs can be modified and loaded into our system.

We also have a popular service directed at young people -- a match-making service, which allows users to create their own 15-second video at home using a digital-video camera, then upload it to our network. The users may then download and view other people's video-clips through their 3G handsets. That's quite a step beyond what current mobile-service providers can offer.

TT: Are these the so-called "killer applications?"

An: I don't want to say video is the only killer application. Actually, many people believe mobile companies must find at least one killer application to allow them stay competitive in the market. But in my opinion, killer applications are almost everywhere.

Look at today's mobile service market: some companies claim that they are offering data services, but these services only accounts for 2 percent to 3 percent of their revenue, which means the other 97 percent of their revenue still comes from voice services.

Moreover, of that 3 percent data service revenue, 95 percent is from short text messages.

In reality there is no data service available in Taiwan at present. I think customers are eager to get useful data services, but traditional mobile-service providers just can't satisfy them.

Currently, we have 70 content-providers working with us creating both traditional as well as video-based content.

TT: You say you are working with 70 content-providers. Won't this make the services rather costly for customers?