Pakorn Pannachet, senior vice president of the Value-Added Service Division, said strategies to increase revenues included promoting easily accessible mobile-phone services on the Internet, creating a Web community and closer collaboration with content partners.

The company will kick off the DTAC service homepage toolbar in May, enabling its customers to send SMS messages from personal computers by clicking on the bar.

It will also introduce a community homepage where its subscribers can post messages or pictures. They will then be alerted by an SMS message when friends access the homepage to comment.

Moreover, it will launch its "push mail" service for individual customers next month, enabling its subscribers instantly to retrieve mail messages sent to free e-mail addresses.

Pakorn said DTAC had about 200 partners working to introduce new mobile-phone content and would work more closely with some of them.

The main revenue contributors among DTAC's value-added services include general content; the use of its General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Enhanced Data Rate for the GSM Evolution (Edge), which are high-speed cellular networks for accessing data; short messages; and music-content Ring4U.

Its GPRS service generated Bt749 million in revenues last year from about 1.4 million users, while Ring4U contributed Bt1.48 billion in revenues.

Currently, DTAC has about 12 million mobile-phone subscribers. Sixty per cent of these actively use value-added services and about 6 million have phones supporting GPRS or Edge technologies.

DTAC's value-added services currently generate Bt45 per user per month when prepaid and post-paid subscribers are combined. However, post-paid users generate average value-added service revenues of Bt90 per user per month, while that from prepaid users is Bt40.

The country's largest cellular operator, Advanced Info Service (AIS), which has about 20 million mobile-phone subscribers, expects revenues from value-added services to grow 20 per cent this year, from about Bt12 billion last year.

DTAC and AIS are both waiting for the National Telecommunications Commission to introduce third-generation wireless broadband licences. They are eager to employ the superior speed of the new technology to provide services like video-calling and interactive wireless games, to further boost their revenues.

Sirivish Toomgum

The Nation