Somchai Lertsutiwong, vice president for the wireless services at AIS, displays the Nokia E61 model, which features a news-on-demand service from five providers.

Leading cellular operator Advanced Info Service Plc (AIS) has targeted a 50-per-cent revenue share of the value-added service (VAS) market next year, which is estimated to reach Bt28 billion.

AIS vice president for wireless services Somchai Lertsutiwong said yesterday that his firm had maintained its share of VAS revenues at 50 per cent or above every year.

AIS is confident of posting VAS revenue of Bt12.5 billion this year, 16-per-cent up from last year. The forecast revenue would account for 55 per cent of the VAS market this year, estimated at Bt23 billion.

Next year, AIS will focus on the segmentation concept by joining with specific businesses in all sectors, such as popular homepages or movie-theatre operators and department stores, to jointly "embed" their content and services into AIS SIM cards.

For example, AIS will team up with movie firms to enable its "movie SIM card" users to easily download movie clips or reserve movie tickets.

"It's not co-marketing or discounts but it integrates their content and applications into our service," Somchai said.

Each of the partners will help AIS distribute these special SIM cards through their channels, which meant AIS would have a wider SIM distribution channel network, he said.

AIS would also encourage its existing product retailers to promote VAS at their shops, instead of selling only the devices, he added.

Another VAS growth catalyst next year is the availability of nine million new mobile phones, half of which feature a host of hi-tech functions. This suggests that there will be a greater number of phone users who can access existing and new kinds of value-added services.

AIS has set aside a VAS marketing budget of Bt400 million and an R&D budget of Bt400 million every year.

The main factor contributing to growth this year is its offering of a broad range of new services, including the much-hyped wireless full song download. Somchai claimed there have been 100,000 downloads per month this year from the AIS network, up from around 1,000 monthly early last year.

The mobile news service is another major growth driver of VAS revenue.

Yesterday, AIS and its five new agency partners - Nation Multimedia Group, INN, iTV, Reuters, and Voice of America - jointly launched a news-on-demand service to enable its subscribers to directly access updated news on mobile phones with one click on the agencies' corporate icons on their devices.

AIS has initially bundled the icons on Nokia model E61 business phones available through AIS channels, but will expand to other phone models soon. Users of other high-end phones can download the icons for themselves from AIS.

The market leader has recently joined with iTV to sell multimedia news clips to subscribers, and already the number has reached 40,000. Overall, its mobile news subscribers total around 500,000.

AIS has 18 million subscribers 10 per cent of whom are businessmen, while 10 per cent are "first jobbers", 10 per cent teenagers, 35 per cent workers, and the remaining 35 per cent blue-collar workers. All up, one million are tech buffs.

Sirivish Toomgum

The Nation