Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大), the nation’s second-largest telecom operator, said yesterday it was working with positioning service (GPS) service provider Garmin Corp to offer GPS service on handsets in a bid to boost mobile data service revenues amid falling voice traffic.
The announcement follows Taiwan Mobile’s posting of a lower-than-expected annual decline in mobile revenues for the second quarter at the end of last month. It said mobile revenues had slipped 1 percent to NT$14.7 billion from a year ago.
Local telecom carriers are trying to spur demand for data transmission by offering various content for mobile phones such as real-time snapshots of Beijing Olympic Games provided by Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation’s top phone company.
Taiwan Mobile sees growth potential in the rising demand for GPS phones and expects such handsets will become popular in the near future.
“We believe the sale of Garmin’s GPS [software] will greatly lift the company’s value-added service contribution to the company’s overall revenues,” said Jeff Ku (谷元宏), a vice president of Taiwan Mobile.
The partnership would help Taiwan Mobile achieve its target of increasing share of value-added services to 10 percent of its total revenues by the end of this year, Ku said.
Value-added services accounted for 9 percent of its overall revenues, up from 7.6 percent last year, Taiwan Mobile said.
“Next year, the contribution should be even bigger,” Ku said.
The Taiwan Mobile-Garmin partnership is the first to offer GPS software, which is sold for NT$100 per use, or NT$1,200 for unlimited use. Last year, Garmin worked with the US wireless service provider Sprint Nextel to sell GPS software to its subscribers.
Garmin, which holds about 28 percent in market share, is the world’s largest GPS device and software supplier.
Shipments of handheld devices embedded with GPS software are expected to grow rapidly to 20 million units in 2010, from 5 million units last year, said Tony An (安志東), a director of Garmin, citing market researcher Canalys’ forecast.
Taiwan Mobile is also looking into selling Garmin’s first GPS mobile phone in Taiwan next year, if the current business model works well, Ku said.
Garmin originally planned to sell the phone during the Christmas shopping season.
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