As the volume of mobile phones on the planet grows and far exceeds the number of PCs, more spammers, spoofers and virus-developers are directing their efforts at the cellular platform. Dublin-headquartered Adaptive Mobile is a company working with operators to safeguard their networks and reputations. Vice president of sales and general manager of the company’s Middle East division, Graeme Baker shares how mobile security is shaping consumers’ expectations and how it will help drive future revenues

Mobile viruses in the Middle East have made headlines in recent years with programmes such as ‘Comwarrior B’ and ‘the Guardian’ infecting thousands of handsets. Unlike PC viruses that can be prevented through software loaded on individual computers, the sheer volume of handsets makes software protection at a handset level ineffective. If one also takes into consideration the different technologies and operating software utilised in mobile devises and how quickly they are upgraded, the scope of the problem becomes even more apparent.

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The promising growth in M-commerce services is strongly driven by the latent need for banking solutions for those unaddressed by the financial sector thus far. Most banks have traditionally focused on the high-end customer segment, limiting themselves to a small proportion of developing countries’ population.

This feature is an extract from a Delta Partners whitepaper authored by partner Javier Alvarez, principal Bart Janssen, associate Guido Arons and the Delta Partners Intelligence Unit

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Last month STC came through as the winner of Bahrain’s third mobile licence, having participated in the final rounds of the bid process without competitors. Given the proximity of Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, and the significant human traffic that commutes between the two countries, it made sense from a strategic perspective for STC to pursue the opportunity aggressively. However, does the absence of any other short-listed bidders in the final stages of the process perhaps point to the concession being a largely unnecessary and unattractive investment?

Jostling for position in Bahrain’s increasingly congested telecoms space will require a large amount of skill

At the end of last month Bahrain’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) confirmed STC the winner of the country’s third mobile licence, with the Saudi operator having bid BD86.687 million (US$230 million) for the concession. With a population of just 1.2 million inhabitants, this implied a per capita licence fee of around US$192 for Bahrain, compared to US$5.50 for the third licence in Iran, and US$36.25 for Egypt’s third mobile licence based on a population estimate of 80 million.

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Analysts at Morgan Stanley remain bullish about telecoms stocks in the EMEA, believing a combination of well-entrenched positions, low penetration levels and pent up demand for telecoms services will help operators maintain strong operational and financial positions. However, research analysts at the investment bank identify Zain and Maroc Telecom as operators exposed to factors such as significant growth of competition in their markets, and of execution risk across a diversified portfolio, therefore predicting limited upside to these stocks’ performance

For now, analysts at  Morgan Stanley believe 2009 looks like another year of uncertainty. The investment bank’s global emerging market economists have lowered their growth forecasts for 2009 four times in the last six months to 3.1 per cent from 6.6 per cent. And while it is forecast that the telecoms sector in the EMEA region is likely to be impacted by the global economic slowdown, Morgan Stanley views telecoms as defensive and continues to recommend investors take an overweight position in EMEA telecoms, particularly through H109 and in the context of other emerging market sectors.

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As mobile penetration continues to outstrip banking facilities across emerging markets by some measure, mobile operators are jumping on the bandwagon to provide mobile banking services to the massive unbanked population. With an estimated 200 million more mobile users than bank customers in the MEA region by 2012 according to analysts, Michelle Mills assesses the factors that have helped the industry-changing M-Pesa mobile remittance service become a sensation in Kenya, and what operators keen on replicating M-Pesa’s success need to know

Mobile-assisted banking has been around for about a decade but with limited appeal in developed economies, where banking services are readily available to most segments of the population. In recent years, the strong correlation between the scarcity of banking infrastructure with the escalating volume of mobile phone users across Africa and the Indian sub-continent, has led to the deployment of several banking and remittance services where the mobile phone acts as a digital wallet. The latter has been defined as ‘transformational mobile banking’ where the mobile phone is central to the service and where no previous relationship with a bank is required, as opposed to ‘additive mobile banking’ where the phone provides a channel to existing bank accounts.

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