2degrees unveils business market push

It's not just the private cell phone user that 2degrees is aiming at now, with a new push into the business market unveiled today. Photo / Greg Bowker

2degrees is now directly targeting the business market and unveiled a number of new mobile plans this morning.

The company's chief sales officer Mark Cleary said the plans had been soft-launched for a number of months but were now being extended to the wider business market.

The plans, which range between $39 and $149 per connection, are designed for both small business or those with several hundred employees, Cleary said.

"We've been researching the [business market] for about a year. When we entered in the market it was very deliberate, we came into prepaid first and built up a base there, entered and postpaid have been doing well and moving into business was always a natural evolution for us," he said.

The company is confident it can compete on price with incumbents Telecom and Vodafone, despite launching less than two years ago.

"We did a study in the last few weeks looking for New Zealand's biggest [mobile] bill. We got hundreds of bills sent into us and we put them in our billing engine to see what they would have been priced at if they were actually on 2degrees. What we found is that everybody would have saved something and eight out of ten [business] would have saved 25 per cent," Cleary said.

2degrees carry-over minutes still apply for business customers and calls between the mobiles on each 2degrees business plan are free.

While optimistic the plans would attract customers, Cleary would not reveal what 2degrees' present share of the business market was nor what it hopes to get to over the next 12 months.

In March, it was revealed the company had about 11 per cent of the consumer mobile market.

Asked if the move was a way of driving up the revenue received from each customer, Cleary said business customers did tend to spend more on calls, texts and data.

The company declined to comment on whether it was doing too much too quickly and said entering the business space now was always part of the plan.

According to documents released by the Companies Office last week 2degrees lost $76.8 million for the year ending December 2010 on a revenue of $107.6 million

For the previous financial period - the first nine months of its operation in 2009 - it lost $51.8 million on revenue of $27.3 million.