Samuel Eto'o MVNO cameroon the first of many personal mvnos

A very interesting MVNO launch recently has been the launch of Samuel Eto'o Fils is to launch his own MVNO in his home country Cameroon.

before going into detail, I want to get across that is is important in many ways:

1. It is in Africa, a continent that has been a world leader in many mobile developments, most so in mobile payments where there are multiple players in multiple regions, and as such the MVNO could server as an important enabler of new mobile technologies where the MNO can sometimes be slow, as well as the regulatory reform that most African countries are on the cusp or or in the midst of
2. It is football, the football MVNO has been very slow to market for various reasons, too many to list here from the last 10 years, but the time is right for the football MVNO, as well as other affiliate MVNO schemes, however, what is important is that the right club, or in this case the right player initiates and sets the tone for others to follow, which brings me to
3. It is the right player, in the right market; an older, respected player who is seen as a positive role model and has done lot's of well intended charity work, not just the token celebrity PR charity work, not just in Cameroon but further afield, whose "brand equity" will export to other countries, but has not chosen a crowded or too high profile market in which to launch

So far so good. Like with any MVNO, there are still pitfalls and the above are by no means a guaranteed recipe for success, however we start well, which is important.

African MVNO opportunity

The African market has been crying out for more MVNO activity for a while. It is a very interesting market where I have done quite a bit of work, from rolling out pan-African pre-pay TV, VAS aggregator and social networking products as well as other projects around pan African mobile payments: in short:

• The market wants regulatory reform, is mostly there, it needs a vehicle to push it, VAS aggregation or app stores may push it, buy MVNOs would be better for everybody - from mobile number portability to single short-codes and numbers in every country to real pan African aggregators
• The market wants more innovation, mobile payments got Africa off to a flying start, but a lack of dynamic vehicles is slowing it down. Once MNOs have got over the shock of MVNOs (usually about the time they see the amount of almost 100% EBITDA positive revenue they generate) they are also a fantastic platform for innovation that does not entrench the market where each operator mimics the other no matter what (GPRS, SMS, PTC, etc). That is, an MVNO in the states could have launched push to talk and would not have caused a de facto push of all MNOs to PTC, as it did with Nextel launching PTC: all that money later, where is PTC now??? 

Personal MVNO opportunity

The personal MVNO had to happen, it is a subset of the Brand MVNO opportunity and could work very, very well as

• Consumers tend to grow stronger and more loyal followings than brands, and they do not tend to go out of fashion as soon as other brands do. 
• They also lend themselves to a wider Value Added Services (VAS) opportunity, where the football club or other brand tend to use the MVNO as a brand extension for their core product, a person can easily endorse a wider range of products without diluting the proposition and as such keep the product fresher, more relevant, for longer. With Football based VAS we have rolled out for various MNOs and MVNOS we have seen subscriptions to footballers' feeds be much, much more loyal than those of clubs or leagues
• Personalities tend to cross borders better than clubs, which at the end of the day are more "national". there is therefore more opportunity to export both the model and the brand itself.
• people tend not to have a conflict: where a club may be sponsored or have links with an operator, a personal brand is seen as a "free agent".

However, having said this, the brand is important - it should be an inclusive brand. Eto'o does not spark a controversy or an objection; controversy may sell initially, but it does not expand well, nor attract the golden feature of any MVNO: loyalty. you also do not want a brand that even the most loyal fan may feel ashamed of or want to keep quiet at any moment. That is, with a club phone, you do not want it to ring when you are in a bar watching a game with a bunch of supporters from another team, or when you have beaten someone away... a player does not have that "exclusion".

So what will be key to personal MVNO success:

1. Value added services, starting with the obvious (which should be for free) but moving beyond that
2. Getting the right deals and partners: the MNO, MVNE and other contracts should not have the usual clauses that make it difficult for the MVNO to be traded, sold or floated or even ported, should it become too big or too different to what was expected and no longer fit either parties strategic needs. This is the case for any MVNO, but more so with ones like this which are firsts, and the unknowns are huge: this could easily attract 1 million or more of the Cameroon population, or could only have 50,000 subs after 3 years, even then, the spend, type of usage, handset preference and many more unknowns mean that any/all of the parties may outgrow or be outgrown by the product.
3. keeping it simple and scalable: no personalised handsets, no VAS that cannot be scaled or retracted or need silly numbers to get ROI... the business model needs to work on many levels and adapt to the unkowns

If it does this we may well have out next MVNO model darling, and it will be all about the brand again... bless :)

I shall be adding more in the coming months and pasting updates vai the Virtuser Google+ and Virtuser Facebook pages, so please like us on Facebook and +1 us if you have found this article interesting, useful or helpful. 

Free entry to French Mobile market

Free MVNO France

Are MVNOs Free in France?

Its an interesting twist on words, calling a new operator "free" but that is a comment for a coffee later. And no, the answer is nothing is free in France, you pay for everything, even being an MVNO :)

What is interesting is the MNOs starting to see the strain of Free. When Virgin Mobile was launched in the UK a similar trend occurred, whereby many people had just had enough of  the complexity and uncertainty of spend on traditional tariffs. In this sense, Virgin Mobile had close to 2 million customers when it had expected to have 200,000.

So what does this mean for MVNOs? In reality these people are the early adopters / first movers. Those whose dissatisfaction with their present offering is so strong that they will take anything new on the market. This is an interesting phenomenon I have seen from my last few MVNO launches in mature markets, whereby you can allow for a certain take-up, sometimes even a breakeven figure of users, to be attracted to a new network just by addressing a niche well enough to capture a single digit percentage or even percentile of a mature market's monthly mobile churn.

So what does the MNO do when and MVNO has its breakfast?

So these were the first movers. In the next two years we will see the me-too's and followers follow, typically 70-80% of any given market, and these will be best attracted by mainstream, niche and other MVNOs that successfully target and attract users from any given market segment that the MNO itself is weak in. So this is a clear sign that French MNOs need to open up to wholesale and capture these niches as strategically and innovatively, and as quickly, as possible.

In many MVNO business models, I have had this element of customer attraction, which I call "churn soak-up" at anything between 5% and 40% of an MVNOs take-up in the critical first 6 to 9 months of operation. The amount of take-up is directly proportional to how well this MVNO business plan, brand, product and proposition addresses a niche, and to some extent how much and what type of marketing is done to address the market and the strength of the MVNO's brand. If you are willing to invest the time (and some money) in getting both the brand and the proposition right and targeting the brand/proposition well (all within sensible SAC margins) then this element of take-up can be in the double digits of growth and soaking up significant percentages of churn in a market.

Update 2013, post 2012 networking conference in Paris: The host MNO did nothing, another MNO took the two biggest MVNOs as full MVNOs on their network! as the Dutch (KPN) say: wholesale is better than no sale!

The flipside? when done well, these customers stay with the MVNO brand that successfully addresses  the niche, long after they have churned from the "rebound" operator, in this the rebound fling is Free in France :) (yes I got to one of the amusing twists of its name :)

MVNO VAS

VAS or Value Added Services were once the darling of planet MNO mobile operator, to some extend they still are, only now we seem to have forgotten all the original VAS and just focus on thenew ones like app stores. Then along came the MVNO, the new darling of Mobile, then it went from retail to wholesale and in the fracas we seem to have lost Value Added Services in the MVNO space.

There are a few reasons for this:


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