Asurion Hits Two Million Handset Insurance Subscribers In Korea
SINGAPORE, 18 August 2005 - Asurion Asia Pacific, leading provider of mobile protection services for the wireless industry, is pleased to announce that it has successfully enrolled over two million subscribers in Korea for its Handset Insurance service, which was launched two years ago.
Asurion's Handset Insurance protects mobile users against the loss, theft and unintentional damage of their mobile phones for a low monthly fee. The service was first introduced by Korea Telecom Freetel (KTF) to its premium subscribers in September 2003 and later extended to all new KTF subscribers in November 2003.
There are a substantial number of mobile phones lost, stolen or damaged each year, particularly in countries with high mobile penetration rates and this incidence rate is expected to increase year on year. In Korea alone, more than 4.5 million mobile phones were lost or stolen last year, up 27.8% from 2003, according to the Ministry of Information and Communication.
Industry research has shown that mobile phone problems like loss, theft or damage are the single largest reason behind customer churn. Proven and easy-to-implement, Asurion's Handset Insurance program enables operators to reduce churn by turning a potentially negative situation into an opportunity for them to service their customers better. This is in line with KTF's "Good Time Management" initiative, which started in July 2003, to provide customers with customer-oriented, high quality, all-out service at every contact point.
"We are very happy with the positive demand for our handset insurance service in Korea through our collaboration with KTF. This is a strong indication that handset insurance is becoming an increasingly relevant and important form of protection against mobile phone perils, which is alarmingly high in Korea. Moving forward, we are looking to roll-out other mobile protection services like data backup and anti-virus to enhance our offerings," said Daniel Currie, President and CEO of Asurion Asia Pacific."Asurion's Handset Insurance program has been very well received by our subscribers since its launch. Most importantly, it has helped reduced our customer churn by half. Our subscribers with handset insurance have a churn rate of 1.2% compared to 2.2% for subscribers without the service. We look forward to growing our existing relationship with Asurion and protecting more customers from mobile phone theft, loss and damage," said Gi-Oon Moon, Vice President, Marketing Group of KTF.
About Asurion Asia Pacific
Asurion is the leading provider of mobile protection services to the wireless telecommunications industry with solutions that include handset insurance and data backup to help mobile operators generate additional revenue, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction. Our wide-ranging expertise includes customer contact, distribution, risk management, product development, repair, reverse logistics and field support. Asurion has the scale and the scope to deliver unsurpassed quality of service. We have over 5,000 employees worldwide and works with operators such as NTT DoCoMo, Korea Telecom Freetel, Cingular,
T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless to serve millions of subscribers.
For more information, please visit www.asurion.com.sg.