Evolving Landscape of the Indonesian Telecoms Market

­Indonesia's wireless communications market has made significant progress over the last five years. By the end of 2008 there were over 150 million mobile devices active in the market and industry revenues grew to nearly US$80 billion. Indonesia is also one of the most competitive markets in the region with 11 mobile operators, which is rivaled only by India.

With abundance of growth opportunities spread across Indonesia's telecom landscape, robust subscriber and revenue growth is bound to continue in Indonesia.

Marc Einstein, Industry Manager for ICT practice at Frost & Sullivan elaborates on the pressing issues that Indonesian operators are currently grappling with. "Despite the significant growth potential in mobile subscribers and revenues growth, the Indonesian market has far too many mobile operators at the moment and consolidation will happen within the next year. The Indonesian market price-war seems to have subsided, and the operators will have to move on from 2G business models to 3G ones."

Einstein notes that operators in Indonesia have seen phenomenal growth in mobile data usage driven by smartphones and USB dongles, but will have to manage pricing and marketing strategies appropriately to manage costs and ensure profitable growth. On the other end, Einstein is positive that fixed-to-mobile substitution will continue to grow. "The fixed line base is likely to continue to decrease as prepaid wireless tariffs are considerably lower than fixed line rates."

In a bid to explore this potential and dissect the growth pie, Frost & Sullivan returns to Indonesia with the 2nd annual Indonesia Telecoms International Summit, which will be held from November 11-12, 2009 in Jakarta.

Posted to the site on 22nd October 2009