A success story

Wednesday, 6 June 2012 00:07 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

THERE are few industries in Sri Lanka that have the same aggressive impact on society as telecommunications and as a new study has found out, there are lessons still to learn not only to expand the sector but also in understanding how other fields could tap into the boom.

Over two million mobile phones were sold in Sri Lanka last year with Nokia emerging as the market leader, a cyber-research company report said earlier this week. According to the Sri Lanka Mobile Handsets Market Review 2011, published by the New Delhi-based IT and Telecoms market intelligence firm CyberMedia Research, the mobiles were worth around 202.7 million US dollars or Rs. 22.4 billion.

In the overall Sri Lanka mobile handsets market, Nokia emerged as the market leader with a 46 per cent share, followed by Samsung at second position with 22 per cent and Micromax at third position with 16 per cent, in terms of unit sales during 2011.

Multi-SIM mobile handset shipments accounted for 35 per cent of the total Sri Lanka mobile handsets market during 2011. The high economic growth rates recorded by Sri Lanka last year are also reflected in the phone market with total 3G phone shipments in Sri Lanka touching nearly 0.32 million units during 2011.

Smartphone shipments touched 0.11 million units in Sri Lanka during calendar year 2011. Samsung emerged as the leader in the smartphone segment with a 27.6 per cent share of shipments, followed by Nokia with 25.4 per cent, the report noted.

The report predicts that smartphone models and services will grow in 2012 as Sri Lanka remains in tune with the rest of the world and ahead in South Asia. Interestingly the report also recommends that mobile producers release more weather resistant and hardy headsets, which they predict would be more in demand in rural areas.

Among the suggestions is that with the spread of 3G services to all major cities Sri Lanka consumers would look to acquire and use more feature rich mobile handsets, thus fuelling greater demand for higher generation air interface devices. This is an opportunity that vendors and service providers can exploit by bringing to market attractive value-for-money device-plus-service packages.

While these already exist to a high degree in the marketplace the report highlights the need for headsets to support more Sinhala and Tamil services so that they can have more penetration in rural areas. Given the high growth rate of mobile phones in Sri Lanka it is possible that a user friendly language can also result in greater access to technology and learning tools for people.

The developing world has already proved that small countries with good telecommunications technology together with attractive marketing and deep penetration can hold the recipe for economic growth. Amid so many challenges Sri Lanka can claim inclusion into this select club of countries and expect future growth as a result.

The vibrant telecommunications market continues to engage and excite regardless of a projected downturn in economic fortunes for 2012. As the market reaches extreme saturation points the emphasis will be on services and with more smartphones entering the country with higher expectations it will be a industry to watch out for.