Taipei Times: As Taiwan's mobile phone market is nearly saturated, what strategies does Motorola have to persuade customers to buy a new phone?
Bill Chen (陳勝裕): A comprehensive product portfolio is very important in a very mature market. We offer a product collection that targets all the segments, from high to low tiers. Motorola has four major segments, Moto Life, Moto Chic, Moto Media and Moto Tech.
The first segment is for users who only need handsets for basic communication. The second segment is for consumers looking for fashion and style. In this category, handsets are not only a communication tool but also a symbol of social status. Therefore, those users are looking for handsets that can suit them as good accessories and status symbols.
For customers in the Moto Media group, handsets can be used as a device to transfer multimedia information, and that's why they are moving towards color displays and embedded digital cameras. We are delivering a device that allows consumers who are looking for fun to enjoy a multimedia experience.
The last segment is Moto Tech, which targets tech savvy consumers who are always looking for the latest and greatest technologies and something cool.
TT: As the majority of users fall into the Moto Life category, who only use handsets to meet their basic voice-communication needs, does this mean that the handsets being bought as replacements need to have multimedia or advanced functions?
Chen: Not really, because no service operator will stop luring consumers. Actually they have continued to promote value-added services such as multimedia messaging service to raise people's interest. Therefore, the replacement market is coming from all segments, though there are more technology and multimedia savvy users looking for new value-added services.
From the operators' point of view, they are working very hard to reduce their churn rate, therefore we are working very closely with operators to bring out attractive retention programs, for instance handset subsidy packages.
TT: Within the next two years, what kinds of services and handset features are expected to dominate the mobile phone market?
Chen: Voice will still be dominating services for the cellular market, because voice communication is the basic need. The uptake of wireless data has become much more important, because service operators want to improve their average revenue per user and the revenue coming from voice is declining.
At the end of 2002, data only accounted for some 5 percent of operators' total revenue in Taiwan, and this year local operators are aiming to increase that number to some 10 percent.
Therefore, handsets companies have to work very hard with operators to come out with new value-added services. Consequently features such as color displays and embedded digital cameras are becoming the basic requirements for new mobile phones. In order to make those features work, to provide a total solution to catch consumer interest, the development in content and applications is also very important.
Motorola's strategy has changed a little bit as well because of these needs and because of the new wireless data era. In the past, we used to sell things we always called boxes, the voice devices, and operators were only selling voice and short-messaging ser-vices. But today, operators are pushing value-added services. Therefore, Motorola's strategy is to provide an end-to-end solution to work with operators to offer a total package for that need.
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