A New Dawn for the Global MVNO and Sub-Brands Market
Something’s up! Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) in Mexico, Denmark, Italy, and Chile gained more net new customers last year than the host mobile networks they rode on within their respective markets. What’s more, MVNO market growth hit 20% in Australia, Singapore, and Sweden, and over 50% in Mexico and Brazil (source: GlobalData). Mobile network operators (MNOs) are responding by launching their own innovative digital or 'sub'-brands.
After a sleepy couple of decades, the global MVNO market appears to be experiencing a new dawn, but how and why now?
Speed to market
Critically, today’s MVNO tech is better. The advances in cloud, SaaS, and digital provisioning models have substantially lowered the time to market for a would-be MVNO. Whereas an MVNO used to take anything up to two years to get online, today’s entities can look forward to a soup-to-nuts MVNO commercial launch within eight weeks. This is allowing brands to take advantage of a significantly shorter time to value, with the flexibility to adjust propositions quickly as customer demand shifts.
Today’s would-be MVNOs can now tap one-stop-shop specialists for everything from the service set-up to billing, with increasingly sophisticated cloud-based tools that now go far further than the traditional mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE) community could provide.
Creativity
All of this is making contemporary MVNOs more innovative. Formerly, MVNOs were expected to compete in just one dimension: low-cost, prepaid, standalone mobile offers. The opportunity for service differentiation was minimal, and bundling was pretty much nonexistent. Most new MVNOs found they were unable to stand out in a market awash with cheap mobile offers.
But some of the youngest and most dynamic new MVNO names in the market today are not only bundling mobile, fixed, and TV products faster and more creatively than ever, they’re taking advantage of digital eSIM for fast customer onboarding, subscription platform models, aggregated entertainment suites, differentiated plans and billing templates, new loyalty and reward promotions, and even try-before-you-buy promotional tools. Today, there are MVNOs launching flexible bundles of non-adjacent products, via a fully-digital, end-to-end experience which allows customers to manage everything through a single app without store visits or even support calls. Consequently, a wider variety of brands – from banking to energy, gaming and beyond – are coming to market with smarter, more customer-tailored and ultimately more differentiated MVNO offers for different communities.
Watch this space
As the global MVNO segment continues to demonstrate healthy growth and above-market average net adds, mobile market optimism is on the up. This optimism will drive a new breed of smaller, lighter, and more niche MVNO and digital brands players to market, as well as event-driven MVNOs with a dedicated service for a shorter period. This breed could even start challenging the MNO community on digital customer experience excellence and service personalization, and even AI service models.
