The Mobile Market : Singapore's Outlook

Editor's Notes

1. Introduce ourselves.
2. Before we start, here’s the agenda for today. Blah blahblah.
3. A quick survey, how many of you here are already a mobile developer or intending to go into the mobile industry?So this presentation is for you.
4. Here’s a video presented by Google, a summary of the mobile consumer market in Singapore as of July 2011.
5. We will share with you some of the statistics relevant to the mobile consumer market in Singapore.
6. We can see that there’s a increase in subscription for 3G plans compared to 2G plans in year 2011. And the subscriptions for 3G post-paid plan is significantly higher than that of 2G post-paid plan.
7. The number of mobile subscriptions increases from 147.1% to 148.9% within 4 months at the end of year 2011. This means that some people are actually owning more than one mobile numbers.
8. In 2010, the majority of feature phones in the market is owned by people between the age of 50 to 59 years, while smartphones and tablets are owned largely by people between the age of 25-34 years. This shows that younger people are embracing the newer technology more than the older generation.
9. As of April 2011, iOS is dominating the mobile OS share, with more than half of the mobile phones running on iOS. Android OS is the next majority, occupying more than a quarter of the share. As we can see, the top three OSes are actually smartphone OSes, and close to 90% of users are using a smartphone. That is not even including the Windows Mobile OS which is not reflected here, probably under the “Others” category.
10. According to consumer research by inMobi as of Feb 2012, majority of the mobile media activities is on browsing, social media, entertainment and games.
11. On the other hand, the app downloads statistics also reflect the kind of activities users have on their mobile phones. Topping the chart is entertainment apps, followed by social apps and media apps.
12. Moving from the consumer’s data, we would like to share how the players in the business is impacting the mobile industry.
13. Local mobile developers are increasingly valued by major industry player such as Microsoft. This shows that there is increasing quality in the apps developed by the local developers. For Microsoft’s Windows 7 OS, 35 Singapore-made apps have made it to the marketplace as a collaboration with Microsoft.
14. The popularity of Singapore-made apps is also increasing, as shown at Accelerate 2010 Asia’s Top Apps. 14 apps from Singapore were voted to the top 50. What is Accelerate? - SingTel Innovation Exchange organised Accelerate as part of TECHVENTURE 2011for the Venture Capital/Private Equity community to engage with and pick the next generation's greatest innovators. (http://www.techventure.com.sg/about.html)
15. The telcos are also promoting mobile app development by setting up their own app stores. These appstores allow developers to publish their apps and get their apps publicized easily through the telcos.
16. It becomes easier for developers to charge the users as the telco allows developers to charge the users through their phone bills.
17. Not to forget, the government is also actively promoting mobile development through programmes such as the Digital Concierge, which is more for developing mobile apps for use in the commercial services.
18. One such apps that was conceived through this programmes is Moobifly by Maven Lab (the company that also made ComfortDelGro Taxi Booking app). It allows businesses to create simple mobile site with marketing tool, shopping carts etc.
19. The government also has a large sum of funds dedicated to funding start-ups. One such grant is the ACE Start-up grant, previously known as YES! Start-ups. This fund is not specifically set up for ICT & Media startups, but the number ICT & Media start-ups, at 58, is the highest number among all the categories, including F&B, retail and services.
20. Out of these 58 start-ups, some of them are actually in the mobile industry, such as burpple, pigeonhole and 2359 media.
21. Besides, giving out monetary support, the government also supports local infocomm companies at the Mobile World Congress, to showcase new innovative mobile products etc. There is an increasing number of companies taking part in the Congress, from 8 in 2009 to almost twice the number in 2012.
22. Lastly, the government also partner with telcos to promote ICT entrepreneurship. One such programme launched was the SingTel Partner Programme in 2008 which lasted for 2 years. The amount of money invested was SGD 2.3 million.
23. Moving from the consumer’s data, we would like to share how the players in the business is impacting the mobile industry.
24. As we can see from the data before, there is a high mobile usage, and a lot of the activities require data connection. IDA estimated that there is 92% growth in mobile data traffic each year. To promote the growth even more, IDA plans to roll out the ultra high-speed 4G network in near future, sometime this year.
25. Singapore mobile developers are also fortunate to have a very supportive government who is giving out up to $50k for each start-up to build its business. As seen before, 58 ICT start-ups have benefited from such initiative. Singapore also boast of many startup incubators. Government also supportive of such incubators, e.g. Technology Incubation Scheme where government ask proposals for the management and operation of such technology incubators
26. Singaporeans in general will to spend some money to apps. Compare to other countries in the region, Sgporeans have more spending power. This means that developers in SG have more option of monetization, rather than just depending on in apps ads
27. Despite the high mobile penetration, SG is limited in population size. Compare to other country in the region, SG market is considerably small.
28. Startups will face tough competition from other well established company. Few years back, the competition is still lenient. Now, new startups need to really come up with good app strategy and innovative idea that haven't been touched on by current player
29. Now we will look at a success story, from 2359 Media. We are priviliged to have opportunity to interview the co-founder of the company Mr. Wong Hong Ting. And now we would like to share with you how they start, how they are doing now, and what's their plan for the future
30. 2359 Media is one of the leading mobile consultancy and advertising company. They mainly focuses on providing rich interactive user experience, and also come up with strategies for clients to engage mobile environment better.
31. They are founded by NUS alumni in 2009. Their first app is actually mr Zhou's fyp project SG Malls, which got over 50,000 users during frist few month in iTunes appstore. They are initially hosted by NUS enterprise incubator, where the incubator provide space, legal+accounting help, bring customers to table, mentors to facilitate intro. Their initial funds come from Yes! Startup which is now ace startup grant. From the popularity of SGMalls, MOH look for them to develop apps to locate nearest hospital. It's good to have portfolio apps to showcase what we capable of.
32. From then on, they have clients from big names like … They also got investment from Singtel. And now they are growing 9 times in term of employee size in 2 yrs
33. These are some of their portfolio
34. In future, they plan to expand to other regional market by 2014. However they believe that most of time its hard to startup to grow significantly without support or being acquired by big company. In singapore context, it is uncommon to see big company do acquisition. Its quite surprising to see amobee is acquired by singtel, so they expect that this positive trend continues. They believe that IPO or acquired, either is fine but they focus on being a company that they can be proud of.
35. Why go mobile? – High penetration rate of mobile phones, government’s support, good infrastructure, easy to publishWhat else can be done? -