Siemens: We will revive mobile

NEWS Siemens has outlined a three-point plan to breathe new life into a downtrodden mobile phone industry. The German handset and equipment company this week, at the 3GSM show in Cannes, continued to tout its fashion-conscious Xelibri line of handsets - typically promoted on the lapels of good-looking models or on cat-walks, as at the recent London Fashion Week. These constitute a part of the plan, all about "acknowledging voice and simple data businesses are still the bread and butter of the industry", according to Rudi Lamprecht, Siemens AG board member responsible for the mobile communications business. The other two parts of the revival plan involve "radically changing" the way the company works with others - meaning it wants more of a partner relationship with operators - and focusing on five service areas. These key areas are: messaging, including SMS, MMS and mobile IM; entertainment, using especially with content delivered via Java - Siemens is now showing off a Java-enabled wireless module; m-payments; location-based services - Vodafone Live! already uses Siemens LBS technology; and IP-based multimedia services (IMS) - platforms for billing and administering things such as video calls and video on demand. Yet despite a somewhat surprisingly glitzy presentation and the fashionable angle the German company is now taking, there are doubters. Consultancy Ovum reckons consumer mobile data traffic will be worth $71bn in 2007 but industry pundits question whether Siemens' approach will get operators to that point. John Strand, CEO of Strand Consult, has been critical. "While Siemens might be able to make mobile consumers think of it as a fashion brand over time, if the consumers like the new designs, the fact that these new phones apparently have no 2.5G capabilities but cost between E200 and E400 should start the alarm bells ringing for mobile operators." He and others, for example looking at some of Nokia devices still being sold in shops, believe getting users onto platforms that support data services is critical in raising how much operators make from each individual - the key figure known as ARPU (average revenue per user). Addressing the higher end market, Siemens has also launched its first phone based on the Symbian OS, the SX1. Siemens is a shareholder in Symbian - which offers its platform in competition with Microsoft Windows Smartphone, the Palm OS and Linux - along with the other major handsets vendors, including from Monday this week, Samsung.