How can we sustain so many phone shops?

eth0_ · 25-07-2004 7:05pm #1

Was walking down Henry St and it struck me how many mobile phone shops there are! On that one street there are six:
Two o2 shops, a meteor shop, a carphone warehouse, a vodafone shop and the Eircom shop which also sells vodafone phones, and then there's also the vodafone stall in the Jervis centre!

Just how on earth are we sustaining so many mobile shops? I mean *two* o2 shops on one small street - seems like overkill to me?

jesus_thats_gre · 25-07-2004 8:41pm

Operators pay a fair amount of commission to the stores... You would surprised how much they get...

Stephen · 26-07-2004 9:33am

contract customers are worth lots to the shops, ready-to-go types aren't nearly so valuable to them.

JTMan · 26-07-2004 9:48am

There are 3, not 2, o2 shops on Henry Street and the 3G store sells o2 phones

I think the strategy behind the o2 store expansion is to take advantage of the ignorant. The people who just walk into the nearest phone store regardless of what it is and buy a phone.

Contract customers are worth a fortune to rip-off o2 voda (unlike in the UK, the Irish contract customer will pay for the phone and get a crap number of minutes) so it is in the interest to have as many opportunities to entice these customers as possible.

eth0_ · 26-07-2004 11:52am

Seems pretty crazy to me! I wonder how many units are shifter per day per operator in Ireland?

JTMan · 26-07-2004 3:06pm

Originally posted by eth0_
Seems pretty crazy to me! I wonder how many units are shifter per day per operator in Ireland?

Very few I bet. They added 4,000 customers in the last quarter between all points. I bet a lot of the 02 stores only add about 10 a day. 10 new customers at over € 1,000 per contract customer per year still = big profits.

Stephen · 26-07-2004 6:33pm

They only make about €360-400 a year from my contract.

JTMan · 26-07-2004 10:02pm

Originally posted by Stephen
They only make about €360-400 a year from my contract.

The average amount they make on an irish contract is € 1,093.14 in call costs alone ( http://www.mmo2.com/downloads/Q1_05-KPI.pdf ). They also make money from insurance and charging customers for phones. So the real ARPU is probably about €1,300 per customer. A lot more than the UK or Germany.

How can we sustain so many phone shops?

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