The anti-terrorist law will clean some of the SMS marketing companies from the market
What does the anti-terrorist law have to do with the real revolution in the market of mass SMS service providers? Seemingly not much, but the requirement in the law to register SIM cards with operators will cause ECO service to disappear from the market. Unregistered prepaid cards will not be able to be used for sending SMS campaigns to customers, and all message traffic will go directly to telecom operators, who will charge for the messages sent.
The anti-terrorism law requires users of pre-paid cards to register their number with the operator if they still want to use the card after 1 February next year. Registration consists of providing a name, surname, PESEL (or passport) number and a signature. The same procedure will also be followed by customers who want to buy prepaid cards. Some telecom operators have started to encourage subscribers to register their numbers by offering packages of extra minutes for those who do so today.
The impossibility of using unregistered telephone numbers to carry out bulk SMS messaging means major changes for the SMS provider market. I observe that some SMS service providers do not wait for the new regulations to actually come into force, but they already modify their business model focusing on other mobile services or they leave the industry. I think some will try to join forces to leverage the potential of their customers to get better prices for operator text messages. I predict that so far strongly dispersed market of SMS service providers will face a period of consolidation and verification. Only those companies which have a strong customer base and offer services of the highest quality will remain in the game.
As far as the price level in the market is concerned, I do not expect a reduction in SMS rates. The period of price war in this industry is over. Prices are already much lower than a few years ago, so the room for maneuver is very small. Certainly, the biggest winners from the introduction of the requirement to register pre-paid cards will be telecommunications operators for whom the disappearance of ECO SMS should translate into increased revenues from mass SMS. In a sense, customers will also benefit from the change, as they will only have at their disposal a service characterized by high security and stability.
In fact, only the service offered today as Full SMS with full support from providers and telecommunications operators will have a future in the market. There is no other way, and it is impossible to modify or improve ECO SMS because this service will practically cease to exist due to the requirement to register SIM cards.
For Infobip, as an international player on the market of SMS service providers, such a change is not a major event and means continuation of our policy on the Polish market. We have direct connections with operators and we focus on close cooperation with them, seeing them as strategic partners.
