MyPhone doing good in RP market

By Digna D. Banzon

DAVAO CITY, Feb. 17 (PNA) -- Barely two years old in the market, MyPhone, the only Filipino owned mobile phone, is doing good with growth sales going high.

David S. Lim, president and chief executive officer of Solid Group, Inc. (SGI) said with the growing number of units sold they will continue to innovate and create the right mobile phone designs for Filipinos.

SGI that owns MyPhone, is the company responsible for in bringing into the Philippine market electronic devices under the brand name Sony and SamSung. Among others, it also owns My Destiny Cable and Internet.

But Lim said with the phenomenon being experienced by Filipinos through social networking they thought of innovating qwerty phones that they would like their CD market to own at affordable price.

Market leaders of this type of phones he said are priced at very high costs but with the MyPhone at comparable features that any ordinary Filipino could own could do mobile networking.

Rogerick P. Fermin, president of MyTel Solutions, Inc said with MyPhone they want to uplift the Filipino standard of mobile phone usage as they want to capture the mass youth market through new social network services. My Tel is the exclusive distributor of MyPhone brand.

Citing statistics of 353.6 percent growth of social networking with Southeast Asian countries ranking third around the world, the market is moving fast, he said.

Given this he said their offering comes with compatible software for mobile networking. It has menu driven software that captures the essence of being Pinoy such as "madasalin" at it also carries Bible messages and prayers, other applications among others Facebook and MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk.

"The buyer has a choice for better plans and the market really is thirsty for something new," he said.

He said their kick off in Davao City of trade in of any bar phone (working or not) for a MyPhone qwerty phone for as low as P2,999 got good results and they will be moving to other cities to also touch base with their market.

Meanwhile, Lim said with their performance last year MyPhone ranked 7th among the branded phones sold in the Philippine market and they target to land in the Top 3 by end of this year.

Estimated sales in 2009 he said was at P500 million or about 400,000 phones was sold by MyPhone last year.

"This is super good for a company like us of only two years old," he said.

Lim also said they keep on negotiating with the Telcos together with other partners in the lowering broadband cost and they expect a good response to this.

With regards to their market, he said Manila still has the biggest number of about 50 percent, 10 percent in Cebu and the remaining 40 percent is shared by the different provinces in the country.

Todate, MyPhone nationwide has 250 dealers and 30 service centers.

He said they are not afraid to compete with the giants because the market that they cater are those that are left mostly prepaid cellphone users which comprises about 98 percent of the market.

High-end phone users or those with post paid accounts are only 2 percent.

"We are not afraid to be different and we will do things that are distinct from the rest," he said.

He said with this big market segment that is willing to go for more sophisticated software they will continue to deliver qwerty phones.

The idea of developing qwerty phones he said was their own innovations and Tinno, their manufacturer based in China, adopted the concept and is now successful in the markets of Indonesia, India, Vietnam and Turkey.

Lim said they will also explore other projects and they noticed that there is high demand for net books even as he said that with their aim of targeting the major market share to them the three Cs is important, namely Customer relations for CCD MyScreen, Communications because cellular phones will continue to be doing good, and Computers as netbooks will eventually replace the desktops. (PNA)
LOR/Digna D. Banzon/lvp