Workz Forms Strategic Partnership With Mobile Streams To Supply Mobile Content Products And Services To Middle East And African Operators

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – March 26 th 2007. Workz Middle East FZE, today announced the signing of an agreement to represent global mobile media specialist, Mobile Streams to network operators in the Middle East and Africa.

Under the terms of the agreement, Mobile Streams will leverage Workz' relationships with mobile network operators to provide world class mobile content as well as content management platforms and services to the Middle East and Africa region. Today, Mobile Streams already distributes music and media content to more than 100 mobile network operators globally from a portfolio of some of the world's premium content providers. This move into the Middle East and Africa underpins Mobile Stream's earlier announcement to develop partnerships in its newly created IMAP region ( India , Middle East, Africa and Pakistan).

Speaking about the agreement, Warren Platt, Executive Vice President Global Business Development, Mobile Streams said he was delighted to be working with Workz on their first steps into this market.

“It was imperative that we chose a partner with the experience of working with mobile operators in the region. After a few meetings with Workz it was clear that their business model and numerous touch points with operators indicated clear synergies in our business models to take this proposition forward.”

Eliot Shepherd, Marketing Director of Workz Middle East commented, “After a number of introductory and subsequent high level discussions, we both felt the time was right to drive this initiative into the regions operators.”  He continued to say, “As in other parts of the world, mobile operators are facing the increased challenge of providing more value to their customers, reducing customer churn and increasing the revenues per user. As we see parts of this region move from developing to a more mature market, the opportunity of operator hosted mobile content and digital media should not be ignored. This also follows our strategy in supporting regional operators expanding globally.”

Workz and Mobile Streams will work together in defining the product and portfolio strategies to present to the regions operators. Operator content offerings can be fully integrated into existing WAP and web portals or custom built to meet individual operator requirements. Whilst the opportunity presented by this deal opens up an extensive amount of licensed material from some of the world's leading media and content producers, great consideration and attention will be given to the regional preferences.

Warren said, “We have agreements with some of the world's leading content providers and media producers and a large amount of this media can easily be translated to the IMAP market and its wide segment of users. Our core content includes monophonic, polyphonic and real-tone ring tones, wallpapers, music and video downloads as well as cartoon animation and games. With such a compelling and extensive library, this initiative transcends boundaries, allowing the operator to address all segments especially in the very important youth segment.”

Business Development Director at Workz, Alan Barry said how much extra value the provision of mobile content through the operator means in reducing customer churn, increasing customer satisfaction and balancing or increasing ARPU's.

“With the rising cost of new subscriber acquisition, it is crucial for mobile operators to maximise revenues through existing users. Selling what the mobile operator has to more of its existing users can increase customer revenues significantly. With the operators directly hosting the media content they also have the potential to provide the customer with an overall improved user experience thereby increasing customer satisfaction.”

Eliot Shepherd finished by saying “This is great opportunity and we are extremely pleased to be partnering with such a prominent leader in mobile content as Mobile Streams.”