McKinsey Medium Market Entry

Okay Mobile

ProHub Comment

This is a structured market entry case requiring candidates to assess expansion strategy across four dimensions: market attractiveness, business model fit, financial viability, and risk assessment. The case tests the ability to identify revenue and cost synergies from cross-selling to an existing customer base, perform financial modeling with straightforward inputs, and recognize risks in entering a commoditized, mature market with high competition and regulatory complexity.

Estimated Time 15 minutes
Difficulty Medium
Source PeterK
50 / 100
Okay Mobile is an Australian provider of mobile phone plans and operates as a MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) on one of top-3 cellphone service providers in Australia - Optus. Okay Mobile enjoys a base of 1M subscribers. The company is considering expanding to energy plans and become a “virtual” energy retailer that has no power generation assets, but resells energy from electricity and gas providers. They hope to get $5M in profits from the energy business one year after launch. Your team is to advise them on whether it is a wise idea.

Clarifying Information

  1. MNVOs purchase wholesale mobile services from one of top-3 carriers and provide cellphone services to end users under their own brand
  2. Energy plans cover electricity and gas sourced from a wide variety of providers (100+ electricity and gas companies in Australia) and depend on usage amount, state and other variables
  3. There are 11M electricity customers and 5M gas customers in Australia
  4. The size of electricity retailing market is $20B and the size of gas retailing market is $3-4B. Both markets grow at 1-3% annually