Growth through Cooperation: How to Succeed in Converging Markets

THERON Business Consulting. Despite years of experience in Mobile Internet ser-vices, the question of how to best tackle the issues of market convergence remains difficult to answer for the mobile telecommunications industry. Particularly the question of whether the industry should move cooper-atively or competitively into an emerging market is a major issue for the players. This paper discusses whether competitive or coop-erative approaches are virtuous by drawing upon two comparative case studies: 1) the introduction of the Mobile Internet in Japan and Europe and 2) the intro-duction of Digital Mobile TV in Germany and Japan (enabled via DVB-H or equivalent technologies). The conclusion that can be drawn from the presented com-parative analysis is that mobile network operators should act on the one hand cooperatively during con-vergence processes. On the other hand, operators should also firmly and self-confidently claim their stake in a new value chain. Such self-confidence is justified because mobile operators dispose of a unique asset that can be successfully leveraged during the bargaining with other players such as media compa-nies. The said unique asset operators dispose of is the capability to provide a central platform that enables with unrivalled ease of use the authentication and charging of content users