Kyocera, Panasonic, and MercadoLibre's e-Payments

IN THIS REPORT I will centre on some surprises and oddities. First, Panasonic was showing as a big thing its "1GB SD card" which was announced in March 2003. I checked my calendar and we're in September 2004. Sheesh, we're far away from the Big Great Northern Nations, but I thought the era of wind sailing for the delivery of goods was over. Toshiba showed prototype 2GB SD cards back in January. But of course that was CES and this is Expocomm Argentina.

CDMA or GSM?:

Just as everyone down here seems to have discovered the joy of GSM mobile phones (as opposed to CDMA and TDMA that were the norm down here until recently), Kyocera surprised me by highlighting two phones at their booth, with a several inches thick pile of brochures for two units: their "Blade" series and the SE44 "Slider", both using CDMA and "CDMA2000". It's a bit ironic, because as far as I know those phones can be only used with only one of the four available mobile phone operators in Argentina. To my knowledge, Movicom, -by then owned by U.S. operator BellSouth- was the only mobile operator that decided to go with CDMA2000. But now that the spaniards of Telefonica have acquired the complete South America operations of Bellsouth, the future of CDMA2000 down here is cloudy. The three other operators (Telecom's Personal, Telefonica's Unifon, and CTI) are pushing GSM like there's no tomorrow.

MercadoLibre, in association with eBay

The folks at Mercadolibre, surprised me with their friendliness and willingness to talk. It was good to see several "relatively young" (for the local industry's average) people of about my own age, so we could talk the same lingo.

Despite the not-very-exciting nature (from a geek's point of view) of the online auction marketplace, it was obvious they knew what they were talking about, and wanted everyone on Earth to sell their complete belongings on Mercadolibre for the good of Mankind and of course the site's 5% cut on every sale's ending price ;).

Finally, I was introduced to Mr. Osvaldo Gimenez, regional manager for "Mercadopago", Mercadolibre's own local Paypal-wannabe service. I used this opportunity to denounce what I perceive as lack of willingness to serve the local market in current e-payment services like Paypal. These restrictions (like requiring people to have bank accounts in the U.S.) make it almost impossible for residents down here to receive money from abroad (see my article "Paypal, internet banking systems use different kind of sockets, plugs" to put things in perspective). We had an interesting exchange of (opposite) points of view. Yet his response was surprising yet predictable, he did what many businessmen down here do best: blame government and the financial regulations, instead of thinking of creative ways to reach the goal without breaking any law. In the middle of our heated argument it was even suggested that "getting money out of the country was almost impossible". Yet he failed to get my point about the money that goes in and out of the country on a daily basis with services like Ikobo and the currency exchange shops. He listened to my ideas, yet I admit that there wasn't much enthusiasm about my position or the suggestion of them pursuing an associating with some local -and foreign- banking partner to ease these money transfers to and from other countries (it should be noted that that's something Western Union has done in Mexico to reduce the cost of their transfers to and from the USA).

Anyway, their MercadoPago faces strong competition, first from local e-payments site DineroMail, and second from foreign e-payment services like Ikobo, YowCow and Moneybookers. In the end, Mr. Gimenez hoped that Paypal "would eventually start serving the region fully". However I read that between the lines as "if the americans do it, there you will have your solution". I hope there's some substance behind that claim rather than a pie-in-the-sky dream.

But let's get back to the other nice guys from Mercadolibre, they kindly invited me to a presentation about "internet-based sales using Mercadolibre as the selling platform".

The second slide was very interesting, as it showed the growth in internet usage in Argentina, and showing 6.2 million users for 2004, and a projection of 7.3M for the next year.

At that point, I was kindly informed by the Mercadolibre person next to me, that further photographs of the slides were not welcome. I assured them that their nuclear secrets would be safe and put the Clie PDA in my pocket, switching to the age-old method of taking notes.

The rest of the presentation had some interesting numbers: they claimed that Mercadolibre has 5M registered users, and that according to Media Matrix stats they were the number one e-commerce site in Latin America, with Mercadolibre (I'm not sure if they were referring to just the Argentina operation) receiving 1.4M hits a month. Another interesting number juggled there was that sales, measured in constant US dollars, rose by 77%. Then the presentation started drifting into generics like "how to sell through our web site", how to fill several different web page forms, and annoyances like that. The presentation concluded that selling through Mercadolibre and having 5% of the sale price taken by them was not only "economical" but also "fun". Go figure.

I thank the ML staff once again for their friendliness and help, despite our personal disagreements they were nice to the Inquirer. I suggest you all go now and bid on this great deal on a broken Umax scanner for $5 us dollars. There's also good Peron memorabilia in there. :)

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