Orcon: We want customers, not prisoners

After canning its entry into mobile last year, Orcon has returned to the market with a commitment to offering no fixed-term contracts, freeing up customers to consume more.“We came pretty close to launching last September, but we canned that because we didn’t want to just resell someone else’s product,” CEO Scott Bartlett says. “We wanted to have control over handsets, the products and the processes. We wanted to have room to differentiate and add value. So we went back to the drawing board.”The revised approach saw Orcon launch four mobile plans on July 19th with rates from $0.39 per minute and a text rate of $0.20. Customers can also bring their existing mobile number over or receive a new 020 Orcon number.“If you really look at the no contract approach, it’s a game changer for mobile phones in a non-prepay world,” says Bartlett. “Everything else is contracted; even data. If you want to get a decent 1GB plan from Vodafone or Telecom you’re looking at a 24-month contract. We’ve got broadband plans with no contracts. Isn’t that just a smarter way of doing it? Isn’t that just putting more faith and trust in customers and giving them more flexibility? We want people to upgrade their plans.”Bartlett says Orcon has subsidies, just like its rivals, but doesn’t think that demands the use of contracts. “We want to have customers, not prisoners. It helps keep us honest as much as anyone else.”Orcon Mobile launched with the Nokia 5030 ($60), Nokia 2730 ($199), Nokia E71 ($699) and the exclusive HTC HD Mini ($699). More handsets will be announced throughout the year and all call centre services are proudly being provided by Orcon in New Zealand.Projections for the new business range from zero to 50,000 customers in two years. Bartlett’s got $10 on a few thousand users within 90 days in an office pool. “The official estimate is none and I’m being completely up front. We don’t know. My $10 is on thousands of users within 90 days. Not tens of thousands; just thousands. One guy here has got his money on 10,000 customers, which is quite optimistic, but good on him.“For us it’s not about the first 90 days. I’d like one percent market share within two years and that sounds like a real low goal, but one percent is 50,000 customers. Fifty thousand post-paid customers within two years, we’d be really happy. I think we can do more than that, but we’d be thrilled with that figure.”When asked if Orcon has an internal deadline that the new business needs to meet financially in order to survive, Bartlett was adamant there isn’t. “No way. This is not an experiment; this is not us taking a car out for a spin. This is the real deal. The world’s going mobile and we think it’s a really critical part of the future for our customers. We think we can add to that, create more value around data and other ways to pay for a phone call. We think we can bring new devices into the country that people have never seen before. Put it this way: if we’re losing money on mobile in two years, we still wouldn’t can it. It’s strategically critical to our future.”