The future of newspapers

Most newspapers in the world face declining circulation and only some newspapers, mainly in developing markets, still continue to see increasing circulation, whereas newspapers in saturated markets are facing remarkable competition from the Internet. As illustrated by Fig.1, only three countries in the EU-15 have recorded rising circulation since 2002: Austria, Ireland and Portugal. All other European countries faced decreasing circulation between 2002 and 2006, whereby the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark suffered most. But not just Europe is showing declining circulation: in the US circulation dropped by 5.2% and in Japan by 2.4% from 2002 to 2006. On the other hand, markets with well performing circulation are for example India (+53.6% in a five-year period) or China (+ 15.5% between 2002 and 2006). More...

VoIP retail residential offers in Western Europe

The following article is based on an InfoCom’s multi-client report published in early January 2008. The report covers residential VoIP offers with a clear focus on services enabling access to and from PSTN and mobile networks. The main 16 Western European countries were examined, i.e. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. In particular all the incumbents in these countries were analysed, in terms of current and planned offers, but also all major alternative VoIP providers. More...

3Q07 prepaid and postpaid situation in selected countries

Previous articles on the prepaid and postpaid situation have illustrated that there is no correlation between mobile penetration and the share of prepaid subscribers. These articles have cited the extreme examples of Italy and Finland to show that, in general, it is the strategies adopted by local mobile operators and cultural factors that drive mobile penetration and not just the proportion of prepaid subscribers. As shown in Fig. 1, this situation remains the same in 3Q07. Italy’s mobile penetration and proportion of prepaid subscribers continue to be at very high levels, while Finland’s mobile penetration surpasses 100% despite maintaining a prepaid proportion below 5%. This article will discuss whether the strategies of local mobile operators and cultural factors also explain the mobile penetration and prepaid and postpaid situation of the major countries in Asia and North America. More...

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