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Following a fierce battle with America Movil for exclusivity in the launch of the iPhone in Latin America, both America Movil and Telefonica were able sign an agreement with Apple.
America Movil was able to leverage the fact that they were first to sign with Apple and Telefonica Movistar, trailing behind, decided to rush to the market in Chile and Argentina with minimal preparation.
We were very surprised to confirm that the iPhone was not launched by Telefonica Movistar with all services -mainly visual voice mail- just to be able to have the same launch date as Claro (America Movil).
Not only is it very unsual that Apple allows this -we know of no other region where this has happened- but the potential for increasing data usage and revenue seems to be completely bypassed.
As we mentioned here before, the iPhone represents a breakthrough product with high potential for increasing data revenues and repositioning traditional services such as SMS and Voice Mail. For example, despite not having presence capability, the user interface used by the iPhone for SMS is the type of applications that is expected to dramatically improve the user experience and consequently, usage and revenue from these services.
Let's hope this does not kill a good opportunity to revitalize the market and improve data services revenue in LATAM, which so far operators have been unable to do successfully.