The economies of East Asia Tigers (EATs), Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, arose in the 1960s and their GDP per capita in 2006 was $22,751 on average. They are all newly industrialized economies of Asia with similar mobile market developments. By the end of 2006, total mobile revenue in EATs was $29 billion and the subscriber base had reached 76 million, with an average penetration rate of 103.95%. Since the economic growth in EATs with strong IT industries has faced the saturated mobile market and the operators are facing fierce competition from domestic and foreign rivals, how to adopt appropriate measurement methodology to evaluate the operating productivity and efficiency of operators and their competing rivals has become an increasing concerned issue. This study uses partial factor productivity (PFP) and input-oriented Data envelopment analysis (DEA) with the most recent set of data between 2002 and 2006 to evaluate the partial productivity and efficiency of 14 major mobile operators in EATs, including SK Telecom, KT Freetel and LG Telecom in Korea, Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan Mobile and FarEasTone in Taiwan, CSL New World, PEOPLES, Hutchi Communications, SmarTone and PCCW in Hong Kong, and SingTel, MobileOne and StarHub in Singapore. The objectives are to evaluate the partial factor productivity of the mobile operators in EATs and measure their efficiency. In the DEA model, voice revenue and data revenue are output variables and total asset, number of employees, capital expenditures are input variables. In sensitivity analysis, when one output or input variable in the DEA model is deleted, the variation of the efficiency score is examined.
The empirical results are summarized as follow. Overall, the revenue per employee (RPE), revenue per asset (RPA) and revenue per capital expenditure (RPC) of these four economies enjoyed a steady growth during the study period. The DEA results reveal that the operators in Korea were the most efficient among all EATs, but the operators in Singapore showed the least efficiency. And the operators which had advanced technology had better operating efficiency scores, such as SKT in Korea. Moreover, the previously state-owned operators usually showed a relatively lower efficiency score than the private mobile operators due to the enlarged operating scales. For instance, CHT in Taiwan and SingTel in Singapore had low operating efficiency scores, while the new entities, such as LGT, FET and StarHub, had high operating efficiency scores, especially in 2005 and 2006. Finally, in sensitivity analysis, voice revenue played the most important role in operators’ efficiency among all outputs and inputs.

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