This morning I watched Nokia Life Tools ad. The ad shows the farmer that helped by the tools because he could know the price of the rice and other agriculture products in the market. The content will be sent via SMS, so no need of expensive HDSPA connection which just available in the big cities only (in Indonesia of course).
So this is Nokia’s attempt to reach the low end market?
Well, in Indonesia the trending topic of Mid-High gadget is full of Blackberry, iPhone and Android. there’s even no small room for Nokia’s Maemo (and Windows Mobile) to be talked.
The Mid Low is the same, there are many Made in China QWERTY Phones which imitate the design of mid high class phone mentioned above (of course lack of feature and high speed connection) in the market.
What Nokia could do?
Aim for the niche one of course, which are the non urban societies. There are several characteristic for this type of society:
- Mostly work in Agriculture sector
- Prefer to use mobile phone, because the fixed line usually not available in their area, and it’s a waste of time to go to the city just to pay the telephone bill only
- Mostly don’t have high speed connection signal
So they do have the mobile phone but not a sophisticated one, the infrastructure is not yet support them for high speed data access. The access via SMS can be more consistent than data, but the problem is how much they should pay?
From this link (in Bahasa), it’s stated that the user should pay about Rp 1,000 per day. I think that’s too expensive, because the price of the data service now is Rp 1 per KB, so with Rp 1,000 you could download about 1 MB data. Well if you say the data and SMS are in a different world, the price of one SMS is Rp 50 per one SMS, with Rp 1,000 you could make 20 SMSs. That means you should access the Life Tool at least 20 times a day for a break even.
Low end everybody?
–
Anton Hermansyah
Tags: Daily Life, Economics
