Carrie Pawsey
EasyMobile fails to make an impact
TDC, the Danish telecoms partner of Stelios Haji-Ioannou's easyMobile, announced on Wednesday that it has put its plans to rollout the easyMobile service to a further nine European markets on hold. This is due to disappointing uptake in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, where it has just 33,000 subscribers. The comments were made by TDC's CEO Henning Dyremose in a conference call to discuss the ongoing takeover of TDC by the Nordic Telecom Company (NTC) group, which is made up of private equity investors. Comment: The poor subscriber numbers are no surprise to us. When we last commented on easyMobile (EuroView Daily, 20 September 2005) we noted that just 15,000 subscribers had been achieved in the UK, and that we couldn't see how easyMobile would differentiate in the already crowded no-frills segment of the German market. Evidently the Dutch launch has also yielded few subscribers. The problems for easyMobile continued when it admitted in that it had not been able to process credit-card payments, which is a significant flaw when you are an online payment-based mobile service. All these problems resulted in TDC removing the outspoken Frank Rasmussen from his role of CEO of easyMobile in October 2005, but it seems that the MVNO has not been any more successful since his departure.The bullish assumptions made by Haji-Ioannou that easyMobile would take 10% market share have always seemed over-optimistic to us. Although the no-frills business model of Telmore in Denmark yielded such a high market share, it did not mean that success could automatically be transferred to other markets. The SIM-only service is not attractive to those subscribers who wish to frequently change their handset, and the lack of customer service with the easyMobile service is a problem for many subscribers. It also demonstrates the power of the mobile operators' advertising budgets; their television, print and radio promotional budgets are far greater than that of any shoestring MVNO.
