Pakistan SMS Usage Growth Highest in Asia Pacific

In addition to being 4th heaviest user country of SMS, yapping Pakistanis have taken an unusual lead in telecommunication: the largest text messaging growth in Asia Pacific. With Pakistan's 763 million messages sent during the "festive seasons", the top five countries with the highest SMS traffic processed over the festive season were the Philippines, again leading the ranking with 2.36 billion messages, closely followed by Indonesia (1.193 billion), Malaysia (1.075 billion) and Pakistan (763 million). In terms of year-on-year growth, Pakistan SMS Text traffic volume grew by 253 percent compared to last year during the same period. Other markets that experienced high messaging growth include Philippines (65 percent), Australia (57 percent), Indonesia (27 percent) and Malaysia (13 percent). "MMS traffic is bound to increase as consumers become increasingly savvy in interacting with their personal blog sites and applications such as Facebook".

SMS has always been popular with Pakistani users and the recent data from PTA provides evidence to this. During the year 2007-08, cellular mobile operators generated more than 25 billion SMS. One reason for this growth is that a majority of user base in Pakistan is young and they prefer to communicate via SMS. On Eid and other celebrations, it is now common (default?) practice to send and receive greetings through text messaging. Text messaging also allows people to be more creative, though the SMS may not always be original. Mostly it is a chain of forwarded messages. There is spam SMS as well, which remains an unsolved problem.

All cellular mobile operators have competed aggressively for SMS and that has resulted in a price war, eroding the ARPU but increasing adoption and volume. The mobile operators offered lucrative SMS deals including special one-time buckets of messages for nominal charges. For instance, Telenor launched SMS Fulltime offer for its prepaid customers in which its subscribers can send up to 10,000 on-net SMS with charge of Rs. 99. Telenor even offered free SMS for those who are on Hajj. There are some packages with a catch as well - such as the Aik Pasa SMS: you pay 1 paisa but the receiver is charged 1 Re.

Late Night Calling Packages And Pakistani Youth

These days there is a rush of packages out in the market from the mobile service providers, targeting different market segments and offering all kinds of discounts depending on who you call or when you call.

Off-peak timings have always been used by service providers to create interest and to lure customers. There was a time not too long ago when the Internet access used to be free at night. Nowadays the mobile service providers are trying to shift customers from PC to mobile phones usage. This is true for voice, data and even Internet. There has been a subsequent change in the Internet and data usage via mobile phones since the GPRS rates have gone down, for example you can send hundreds of text messages per day to any network in the country.

The bigger trend is on the heavily discounted late night time calling packages, which are in effect usually from 11pm at night to 7am in the morning. In these hours a single call costs you a total of 3 to 6 rupees an hour. All big names of the telecom sector are competing with each other. Some examples include Warid (infinite craze, zem nites), Mobilink (Raat Shuru Baat Shuru), Djuice (jaagtay raho package), Zong and Ufone.

The most controversial idea behind these packages is the timing: from 11pm in the night till 7am in the morning. These packages are purely targeting the younger generation. A large percent of the people think these kind of activities are hurting our youth and blame the telecom companies for this trend. Is blaming the telecom comapnies the right thing to do?

The times are gone when parents used to keep a close watch over their children and monitor their every single activity. Now a days the youth is much mature and have more exposure and more understanding of things. The parents perceive things quite differently from the youth though and the negative or positive aspects are seen differently. The responsibility falls over to children of how better they understand the life around them. Certain priorities must be set according to the age and these priorities should never be compromised. It’s not a disastrous marketing strategy or a false move by the telecom companies, its just how we think about it. Staying up at nights and fight through long working days will definitely affect your health, education and professional life. Staying up nights when the days are free makes sense. So its all about prioritizing your goals in a certain way so that not your sleep or professional life is disturbed.

1. Mobilink 28,479,600.
2. Telenor: 19,387,956.
3. Ufone: 19,301,180.
4. Warid: 16,914,054 and
5. Zong: 5,503,274.

Total: 89.9M down from an all time high of 90.5M.

The chart below shows the net gain/losscomparison during the 2008 year.