Poste Italiane plans cellphone service
Poste Italiane, the postal company owned by the Italian government, said Monday that it would begin selling mobile phone services by the end of the year as it aims for a slice of one of the world’s most lucrative, yet saturated, markets.
Poste Italiane, which plans to sell the services in partnership with one of the country’s four existing cellphone operators, will pay a fee to use their infrastructure as it sets up what is known as a mobile virtual network operator. The company aims to have two million clients five years after the service has been introduced, the Poste chief executive, Massimo Sarmi, said at a presentation. He declined to say which of the existing Italian operators he expected to sign the accord.
“We have spoken with Telecom Italia Mobile, Vodafone and 3 and they’re all interested,” Sarmi said during an interview after the presentation. “There are a lot of cellphone users in Italy, but we think there is room for six million new SIM cards to be activated by 2009.” He said Poste was counting on getting most clients from those six million. “I’m not counting on getting many clients who use the existing operators, but it could happen,” he added.
To grab new clients, Poste plans to leverage its 14,000 branches, which reach into every corner of Italy, Sarmi said. About 1.5 million people enter an Italian post office every day, and the company has a successful banking business with 20 million clients – holders of bank accounts, credit cards or prepaid cards that could be directly linked to pay for cellphone services.
“We have a huge number of clients so we can afford to have very low margins in our businesses, and that will be the same when we launch the cellphone services,” Sarmi said. Italy already has more SIM cards than inhabitants, but there is no reliable figure for how many people actually have a cellphone because some have multiple SIM cards.
Virtual operators have existed in the United States and Europe for several years, including Virgin Mobile in Britain, Yoigo in Spain and Beyond Mobile in the United States. But most have failed to make a significant impact on the market. The two exceptions are Denmark and Germany, where virtual operators like Debitel have carved out more than 20 percent of the market, according to a Poste Italiane document.
Poste Italiane also said Monday that 2006 net income almost doubled to EUR676 million, or USD900 million, from EUR349 million, while sales rose EUR600 million, or 3.5 percent, to EUR17.1 billion.
