Budapest, February 9, 2015 12:30
The popularity of flat rate, unlimited bundled tariff packages continues among business mobile subscribers, offering enterprises the forecastability of mobile telephone expenditures. They enjoy the benefits of the decreasing price trend – ongoing in the telco sector for several years – with such reasons in the background as intense competition among operators, more favorable service fees, the emergence of unlimited voice and mobile data tariff packages, as well as smart devices becoming available at ever lower prices. However, customers choices in the corporate segment are not only driven by price, as they attach importance to high service level, reliable services as well as partnership based customer service and the wide assortment of available supplementary services – as it was revealed by the 2014 data of Telekom on SME customers.
Earlier SMEs only purchased smart devices to a limited number of associates – mostly company leaders – however based on the Telekom experiences gained last year this took a new direction: ever more associates are involved in the company mobile fleet services, due to the highly available and affordable smart devices – the assortment of which will increase further – and to rapidly expanding broadband 4G network, as well as favorable tariffs. Business customers also appreciate integrated propositions, offering both mobile voice calls and mobile internet – these offers are expected to remain in high demand also this year.
„Ever more SMEs recognize the importance of the reliable telecommunication background, and how they can benefit from making the daily business operation easier. The corporate IT market has been continuously increasing for several years, demand for IT services rendered to SMEs increases steadily, therefore the relevant sub-markets are expected to increase by 3% for Telekom” – said Péter Lakatos, chief officer of Magyar Telekom, responsible for SME services.
Last year SMEs primarily increased their spendings on IT tools and services, these investments increased by 70% among the Telekom SME customers. Within this category, SMEs spent most on notebooks available for a monthly fee – such spendings increased six times – but amounts spent on office servers and cloud based office service packages also increased. Within the notebook offering not only lower priced units were sold, but in 17% upper category laptops were purchased.
The reason for this spectacular growth is that cost sensitive SMEs prefer solutions enabling them to forecast and budget their expenditures – while IT tools available for a monthly fee, without any investment needed and IT services (with the background of cloud based technologies offered by the operators) provide exactly such benefits. SMEs recognized that there is no need for such expertise on their behalf, as the operator practically offers a ready-to use office package in a box, providing continuous and reliable development, product support which they can also oversee – and all these for a fixed monthly fee.