mobile market

Last week a new service was launched in Bangladesh that connects people who are selling products with potential buyers through their mobile phones. The service CellBazaar was started with support from GrameenPhone, the country’s largest cell phone provider.

What the service does is allow people to access a database of goods via SMS from their mobile phone. Once a user registers their phone and their location by sending a message to an SMS short code, they can enter their product into the database, look around for something to purchase, or just check the going rate for a certain product in different towns.

CellBazaar creator Kamal Quadir says that the service is not just mobile classified ads but a social development service that cuts out the middlemen for buyers and sellers, which means more profits and savings for them. He envisions, for example, that the service will let farmers get a better price when they sell their potatoes. And if a farmer or another seller doesn’t have their own cell phone to send the SMS from, then they can look for a “Phone Lady” who will let them use her phone for a small fee.

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Cell phones have added $650 million to Bangladesh’s gross domestic product (GDP) and created almost 240,000 jobs in the country. On top of that, most of the jobs pay significantly more than the average job, a recent study by the international firm Ovum found. Grameen Phone, and its Village Phone program, should be given a lot of credit for this.

Grameen Phone is currently the largest mobile phone company in Bangladesh with seven million subscribers in April. The telecom company itself is a for-profit operation but has a nonprofit arm that works with the microfinance giant the Grameen Foundation to get mobile phones to people living in poor, rural areas. How the Village Phone program works is that select members of Grameen’s micro-banks, usually women who have proven their ability to work and repay loans, use a small loan from Grameen to purchase a mobile phone. Often times this is the first working phone the village has ever had. The women then turn the mobile phones into businesses, charging fellow villagers a fee to make calls. Essentially this makes each owner of a Village Phone the head of a small, mobile call center.

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Great article in the UK Times about the mobile market in Africa and the enormous growth there. 

"This remarkable growth — the African market is expanding nearly twice as fast as Asia’s — has confounded analysts and even service operators. As recently as 2003, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) forecast that there would be only 67 million users by the end of 2005.

“Many of us underestimated the strength of the informal sector in Africa,” said Michael Joseph, chief executive officer of Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest operator, with four million customers. “And the huge need and desire for people to communicate.”

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