Orange seeks to broaden appeal of mobile data

Telecoms operator Orange wants to generate at least a fifth of its mobile sales from data services in the next few years, up from about 6 percent now, and will tempt consumers with offers for particular interest groups.

"We have had good growth of non-voice, non-SMS services, but really on the back of a short tail of customers, said Olaf Swantee, the head of mobile at Orange, which is the main brand of France Telecom.

"A small group of customers pretty much use the entire data of the network --the iPhone users, the Blackberry users, the smartphone users."

In saturated western European markets where nearly every consumer has a cellphone, selling mobile data services is one way operators can still produce top-line growth.

As example of one of the new services Orange will offer, Swantee cited a deal for consumers that use social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace a lot.

Orange and LG, the supplier of the phone, developed custom applications that were coupled with a data plan with unlimited access to social networking sites. It substantially boosted usage in that segment, he said.

"Orange today has close to 180 million customers, and 90 percent of those customers are not really using the mobile Internet," Swantee told Reuters ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry's biggest annual gathering.

"With this new approach, we believe we can get non-voice revenue up from 6 percent to over 20 percent of mobile revenue in the next couple of years."

Following the runaway success of Apple's AppStore that lets users buy and install thousands of iPhone programmes at the touch of a button, Orange will launch a similar online store from May across its European markets.

Orange's widgets -- small software programmes -- will give users easy access to online content or services they are interested in, for instance weather reports or news updates, the company said.

It plans to open the platform to third-party developers to give consumers more choice.

Nokia and Microsoft are rumoured to be among those planning to launch similar stores.