Who Brings iPhones to Vietnam?

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Saturday, August 23. 2008

Local media is discussing which mobile operator would be Apple's partner to sell iPhone 3G in Vietnam. The two leading mobile operators Mobifone (a subsidiary of national telecom carrier) and Viettel (a powerful army unit) are racing for the exclusive rights of iPhone distribution. My estimate is about 50K of iPhone 2G in Vietnam and 2K of iPhone 3G used with SIM unlocked. Since iPhone 3G is still hardware unlock and the price is too high (around 1000 USD vs 700USD for 2G) so that many iPhone fans are waiting for full unlock solutions and reasonable prices. The leading mobile handset distributor, FPT's FDC is still silent about their plan for iPhone. In fact FDC is a leading distributor of Macbook and iPod in Vietnam. In the eyes of Jobs & Co, Vietnam is a third tier or fourth tier market. Apple's ranking of foreign markets is not based on volume of users but quality of subscribers where they can pay for the bundled services such as iTunes. Mobifone has more quality subs than others. How much the contract to subs is a difficult question since Vietnamese mobile users are not familiar with this kind of contract.

Posted by Jason at 12:29 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: FPT, iPhone, Mobifone, Mobile, Viettel

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Vietnam have been seen operator subsidize handset in only CDMA operators, which I believe is dying market segment. Vietnam GSM operators seem never had experience with handset subsidizing or revenue sharing with handset suppliers so far. The problem is it hard for operator to enforce 2 years contract with consumers. The easy way for Apple enter Vietnam is selling unlock iPhone which I doubt Job and Co. not quite interested at the moment.

#1 xman on 2008-08-23 17:30 (Reply)

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Who Brings iPhones to Vietnam?

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Saturday, August 23. 2008

Who Brings iPhones to Vietnam?

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