Mobile Vikings is not just the cheapest mobile internet operator in Belgium; Mobile Vikings is also world’s first Community driven operator. Not profit but relation with the members is essential.
Therefore the Mobile Vikings’ business model differs strongly from the one of the other operators: hardly a marketing budget, no selling points or salesmen. On the other hand 78% of the members are introduced by existing members.
Although Mobile Vikings only works on a prepaid basis, their customers belong to the most loyal in the world. Mobile Vikings is not just a company, it is a movement. The ultimate objectives are free mobile internet for all, strengthen the community and continually work for new member benefits.
In May 2012 they welcomed the 100,000th Viking and in September member number 125,000.
Frank Bekkers – CEO, Mobile Vikings
Reading Frank Bekkers’ resume, one gets the impression he is a serial entrepreneur. One is right. Mobile Vikings is his 13th company, preceded by various others like Tupperware, Creneau, Medical Software and the Living Lab i-City. As varied as all these companies were, there is one thing connecting them, one thing that is Frank’s real passion. It encompasses creativity, new and different business models, in a word: innovation.
Mobile Vikings is a fine example. Creating an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) without a brand, without points of sales, with a whole new approach and rapidly muscling his way into a market that was supposed to be saturated, for Frank it’s just what he does.
He is more an evangelist than a CEO. To quote George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”