VietNamNet Bridge – While mobile network operators previously only focused on selling high-grade mobile phones associated with service packages, they now target the low-cost market segment, since manufacturers rush to popularize the hi-tech products.

The sixth mobile network operator in Vietnam – Vietnamobile – has said that it would run a series of sale promotion campaigns in 2013 to give more opportunities to consumers to approach its services.

Vietnamobile’s salesman teams would be present in many provinces and cities to give advices and distribute simcards directly to customers. Especially, it plans to join forces with some mobile phone manufacturers to implement a plan to bring popular smart phone products with integrated Vietnamobile simcards directly to customers.

A senior executive of Vietnamobile has revealed that the products to be used in the campaigns are low cost smart phones, priced at less than VND4 million. Though these are low cost products, they not only can satisfy the basic needs, but also can be used to surf on Internet, take pictures and shoot videos.

In fact, the marketing method called “selling beer together with finger food” – selling mobile phones integrated with services – was once applied by VinaPhone, MobiFone and Viettel, the three biggest Vietnamese mobile network operators, in 2011 already.

At that time, the two mobile phone product lines the network operators mostly used to attract customers were high grade smart phones – iPhone and Black Berry, which were sold at tens of millions of dong, or very cheap products, priced at no more than VND2 million. However, there have been big changes so far.

The military telco Viettel has recently announced that it successfully makes the smart phone series with two integrated simcards priced at less than VND2 million.

“Low cost smart phones prove to be a growing tendency for now, especially in the context of the economic difficulties. We will offer more products to customers for their choices that fit their pockets,” he said.

A source from MobiFone has revealed that the mobile network operator planned to cooperate with a low cost mobile phone manufacturer to run a campaign to sell simcards together with phone sets.

“The negotiations are nearly completing and we hope we can reach an agreement right in the first quarter of 2013,” the source said.

Prior to that, Beeline, which is now Gmobile, also joined forces with a big South Korean mobile phone manufacturer to develop a similar marketing plan. The products it planned to use for the plan were the smart phones priced at between VND2.5 million and VND5 million.

A report by GfK showed that 16 million mobile phone sets were sold in Vietnam in 2012 with the total revenue of VND27 trillion. The figure was believed to be below the expectation with the purchasing power down by 10 percent, while the market grew by 10-15 percent in previous years.

However, the hallmark of the market in 2012 was the strong rise of smart phones, especially the ones running on Android operation system. The product series now account for 18 percent in quantity and 50 percent in value.

Le Thao Trang, Marketing Director of Thegioididong, the biggest mobile phone distributor in Vietnam, said the number of products to be sold in 2013 would not be much higher than in 2012, but the revenue is believed to increase significantly, because smart phones would be the main products to be sold.

TBKTVN