Really can't talk about International Roaming without bringing up eSIMs. This is where this market is going to change drastically. Being able to purchase a SIM digitally in just about any market is going to reduce barriers and allow good, easy to use products to find their way to the top. Gigsky and Truphone already seem to be having success with their eSIM products, but if you compare their prices with that of AIS SIM2Fly out of Thailand, who have just launched their
eSIM, they are blown away.
So how can SIM2Fly do this? Well, look at the top 10 most visited countries in the world:
The World's Most Visited Countries
Rank International Visitors (millions), 2017
1 France 86.9
2 Spain 81.8
3 United States 76.9
4 China 60.7
5 Italy 58.3
6 Mexico 39.3
7 United Kingdom 37.7
8 Turkey 37.6
9 Germany 37.5
10 Thailand 35.4
Thailand has roughly 10m outbound travelers. That means for every 3.5 people that visit, one person goes abroad.
Think of this from a mobile data perspective. For every visitor to Thailand needing 5GB of data, a Thai outbound traveler would have to consume 17.5 GB of data on their trip to balance International usage. This is not happening. Instead Thailand has a major data imbalance with other countries. This is important because of the way major carriers exchange data. Rather than Thailand’s AIS sending $10m USD to Japan and Japan sending $35m USD to Thailand they exchange Gigabytes instead. Thailand may give 10 TB to Softbank Japan in exchange for 10TB of GB for AIS Thailand. So Thai operators are swimming in overseas GBs and need to recoup this asset in some way. Enter the traveler SIM. Because of its competitive pricing it’s able to sell it’s overseas data glut to more than just Thai people.
There are likely other countries who have a similar advantage, but it’s quite pronounced in Thailand do to the already low costs of data.
And this is where the eSIM comes in. If AIS adds a competitor to the Gigsky eSIM app, anyone, anywhere could tap into their prices via a simple eSIM swap.