Roman Friedrich
Without alliances, network operators run out of blank Dusseldorf – mobile services, so-called apps, have changed according to analyses of management consultancy Booz & company from an initially sneered niche market to a veritable industrial revolution. Alone, a sales volume of EUR 2.3 billion will generate 2010 expected to Apple’s app store. One-third of it goes directly to the inventor of the new market segment. App store operators can make it an annual sales growth of up to 73 percent until 2013. Then over a billion Internet-enabled smart phones will drive mobile data usage in the height and alone app downloads raise revenues of 17 billion euros. Revenue from advertising or games are not even taken into account. So far, especially Apple dominates the app economy and secures the lion’s share of this market of the future. Google and the BlackBerry maker RIM follow by far. The incumbent operators feel this development only through increased transport on their networks, but hardly about revenue growth for mobile Internet use – and that, even though there’s not this source of revenue without their investments in broadband and mobile infrastructure. The high proportion of flat-rate tariffs prevented not only in Germany that the revenue of the operators grow proportional to the volumes of data. Only a strategic pivot offers a way out of this dilemma and usage – and volume-dependent pricing models, so the recommendation by Booz & company. The development and implementation of a sustainable app strategy is a task in the short term to be against this background to be able to generate a contribution to the growth in the largely saturated, established mobile markets such as Germany, Western Europe or the United States. We see the app economy for the telecommunications industry as a sustainable trend. Even if the market is already very well developed, the mobile operator should leave alone the associated value chain never new competitors”, says the telecommunications expert Roman Friedrich from Booz & company.