Nokia, TeliaSonera Sees Explosive Mobile E-mail Growth"

STOCKHOLM -(Dow Jones)- Swedish telecommunications companies TeliaSonera AB (TLSN.SK) and Nokia Corp. (NOK) sees usage of e-mail in mobile phones growing rapidly in the coming year, despite current obstacles to growth.

A survey among mobile phone users with business subscriptions in Scandinavia, commissioned jointly by Nokia and TeliaSonera, show that 14% of users already use their mobile phones to read and send e-mail.

"Over 50% of those who don't use it today foresee that they will within a year from now," said Sara Kullgren, president of Nokia in Scandinavia.

It's an "explosive development," Kullgren said.

Other research by Nokia show that the figure in Scandinavia is higher than the European average, but she said that the trend is the same everywhere.

TeliaSonera said the 14% figure appears slightly higher than what is likely to be the case in reality for the company's Swedish mobile business customers.

Erik Heilborn, head of TeliaSonera's operations targeting business customers in Sweden, indicated the figure may be 3-4 percentage points too high.

Heilborn said TeliaSonera have approximately 1.2 million customers with business subscriptions in Sweden, but couldn't give an exact figure for the number of mobile e-mail users as it's not always possible to distinguish between different types of traffic in the network.

Currently TeliaSonera charges SEK295 per month for unlimited use of its key mobile e-mail service aimed at small and medium size businesses.

TeliaSonera doesn't disclose revenues from its e-mail services.

Heilborn said the company now sees data traffic in its network growing 300% compared to a year ago and that the company has 1 million mobile data users in Sweden.

The figure includes all data traffic in the mobile networks and not only that generated by mobile e-mail.

He cautioned that the strong growth comes from a low level, both in traffic and revenue.

The survey commissioned by Nokia and TeliaSonera show that small screens, poor keyboard on the phones and users saying they have no need for the service are key obstables for take-up of mobile e-mail.

Heilborn said high cost for using the mobile phone for reading e-mail when travelling abroad could also be an obstacle.

-By Magnus Hansson, Dow Jones Newswires;+46 8 545 130 91, magnus.hansson@dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires"

Posted to the site on 11th October 2005