The GSMA Marketplace is the only dedicated digital commerce platform for the mobile industry and was created to help buyers and sellers in the telecoms industry do business together more easily all year round. Procurement in many cases is a business built on existing relationships but by moving it online we believe we can revolutionise the industry, drive efficiencies and help to eliminate the huge amount of time that gets wasted on identifying and contacting potential new suppliers. Of course it takes time to change the way people do business and so we recently conducted research into the sector to find out how things are done today.

We surveyed 125 mobile industry procurement professionals working at mobile companies of all sizes and discovered that the majority of companies surveyed (61 per cent) currently conducted less than 10 per cent of their procurement online. However, although 52 per cent of respondents expected their online procurement spend to increase in the next year, the vast majority (76 per cent) projected the growth to be 25 per cent or less in the next 12 months. We discovered that, despite the mobile and telecoms space being one of the most technologically advanced industries, it is still very traditional in its approach to identifying and working with new suppliers, with a lot of companies relying on pre-existing personal relationships. Consequently relatively little of the $1.3 trillion business in the mobile industry is being conducted online at present and companies are missing out on discovering new suppliers that could offer better pricing, superior service or innovation to their customers.

Despite this we appreciate that this is a nascent space and the GSMA Marketplace is still helping to change how the industry will do business in the future. We have grown significantly over the past few months and have achieved some significant milestones. There are now 500 buyers and 2,400 sellers from all over the world listed in the GSMA Marketplace Company Directory including brands such as AirWatch, Bharti Airtel, Etisalat, Orange, IBM, Lenovo, NTT Docomo, Nokia, Samsung and Vodafone. There has also been over 120 RFX posted on GSMA Marketplace representing more than $200 million USD in estimated contract value. Some of the most popular requested products and services include device sourcing, application development, mobile enterprise solutions, cloud services, application development, data analysis and M2M systems. The number of opportunities posted every week continues to increase exponentially.

We have also made several improvements to help buyers and sellers even more. We have updated the Company Directory to prioritise those sellers that are more active on the platform, which will help buyers find more engaged sellers more easily. We also updated the templates for sellers with platinum accounts meaning they can create better virtual storefronts and upload more documents, as well as post videos.

GSMA Marketplace at Mobile World Congress 2016

Please visit us at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on the Upper Walkway above Hall 4 to find out more or speak to our representatives. We are also hosting a seminar on ‘Best Practices for Procurement in the Mobile Industry’ on Thursday, 11:30-1300 in CC1 please go here to register http://tinyurl.com/jhw3o6g. To set up an account or for further information please visit our website: GSMA Marketplace.