NEW YORK-John T. Stupka, president and chief executive officer of SkyTel Communications Inc., said a BellSouth Wireless Data L.P. advertisement that’s been running in the Wall Street Journal, as well as in other newspapers, is misleading but nevertheless welcome.
The ad compares SkyTel’s messaging service, using the Motorola Inc. PageWriter 2000, with BellSouth’s service, which uses Research in Motion’s Inter@ctive device.
“It’s a broad market, but there’s a broad (consumer) `unawareness’ that has been our main obstacle, so I am pleased to see competition arrive,” said Stupka regarding the two-way market, speaking last week at the Warburg Dillon Read 1998 Global Telecom Conference.
“PageNet and BellSouth are advertising. That’s great.”
Stupka said he’d rather have a smaller share of a 6.6-million subscriber market than all of a 1-million customer market. He cited projections for an 18-million customer market by 2002.
“Until the last month or so, there was a trade-off of a larger device in order to get better coverage, but now small devices offer better coverage,” he said.
“The old paging sector has been banged around a lot, but look for a profitable transition to wireless messaging.”
Comparing wireless messaging with cellular telephony in its early days, Stupka said he is optimistic 1999 will mark “the inflection point” after which an upward trajectory of adoption will occur. SkyTel will be “a profitable company within the next 12 months,” he added.
Furthermore, contrary to earlier concerns, “growth in two-way is not cannibalizing our one-way service,” Stupka said.
The chief executive said SkyTel expects to stuff the Christmas stockings of its subscribers with more than 80 choices of information services by year-end, a 10-fold increase in offerings now available. One, called “While You Were Sleeping,” will provide financial information from foreign capital markets in different time zones, he said.
“Some of (these services) are free. Some cost a few dollars a month. Some are sponsored by other companies that want to advertise to our customers,” he said.
“We don’t have any exclusive agreements with content providers.”
About a third of SkyTel’s distribution is through its own centers. Existing paging carriers and MCIWorldCom account for a very substantial percentage of customers acquired through reseller channels, Stupka said.
“My first choice for broader distribution is to get people whose services I complete: e-mail, the Internet, wireless phones,” he said.
“Next year, we will become very aggressive about the No. 1 thing the device does, which is to complete other (telecommunications) services.”
While high-end business users have been its primary two-way messaging customers so far, Stupka said Skytel plans soon to target the consumer market.
