Is there a rationale to support a 10 cts price for most global operators, after SMS boom?
Hi Daniel, In my opinion the cost of SMS to the operator would be closer to zero. I’m not too sure about the price to customer in the US but in India its about 1 cent per SMS. At this price there are over 120 billion messages generated in India over the last year. Given this volume, SMS usage has dropped by 15% over the 6 months and the operators are largely blaming the “high cost” of sending an SMS as the reason! When I said the cost to the operator is closer to zero, I was referring to it from a capex perspective. The biggest cost component of SMS is the interchange fees (between operators) and opex costs of tracking, billing and recharge. The only indicator to the cost of SMS would be the fact that operators are continuing to drop prices for SMS and atleast in this part of the world, some of leading operators generate about 15% of their revenues from SMS.
