In my first post I talked about the high amount of competitors that Skype was gaining each day, even though they represented a threat, they were not big enough. But today I read about the huge American leader AOL getting hands on it. The offer is:
“Free inbound calling along with your own phone number with its AIM Phoneline service. For an additional $9.95 a month, you can get unlimited calling to 30 countries” (Taken from: George Ou’s Blog).
This is really a disruptive offer in price and in services, but it doesn’t affect Skype so much. AOL is a regional company and just serves the American market. Even if USA is the biggest Skype market, it just represents the 9% of its user base. I found in the EuroTelcoblog how is the Skype’s user-base distributed in the main countries. The information in parenthesis is the position and percentage 2 years ago (2004):
[1] United States – 9.13% (1, 10.3%)
[2] Poland – 7.87% (3, 8.78%)
[3] Taiwan – 7.80% (2, 9.24%)
[4] China – 6.75% (6, 5.89%)
[5] Germany – 6.06% (5, 6.18%)
[6] Brazil – 5.85% (4, 7.24%)
[7] France – 5.62% (7, 5.53%)
[8] United Kingdom – 3.50% (10, 2.94%)
[9] Netherlands – 3.47% (8, 3.50%)
[10] Japan – 3.17% (12, 2.61%)
[11] Spain – 2.64% (15, 1.82%)
[12] Israel – 2.36% (11, 2.94%)
[13] Canada – 2.22% (13, 2.46%)
[14] Belgium – 1.95% (14, 2.10%)
[15] Italy – 1.91% (18, 1.44%)
[16] Denmark – 1.73% (9, 3.07%)
[17] Sweden – 1.62% (16, 1.76%)
[18] Turkey – 1.59% (not ranked)
[19] Switzerland – 1.42% (19, 1.22%)
[20] Australia – 1.41% (17, 1.46%)
Skype made its move at the beginning and now it’s evenly distributed, different to AOL or Vonage. This new move is a hit against Vonage. In my opinion, Vonage is going to be sold or will die soon, they are over expending in marketing (as shows their income statement in their investor section of their website) and they can’t maintain their user-base with their actual prices.
I give three months for something to happen, just wait and see if I’m wrong 😉