SpinVox Makes Play for Latin America with 12 New Rollouts

SpinVox, a voicemail-to-text provider, last night began processing its first messages in Argentina through a partnership with cellular telecommunications provider Telefónica.

The company rolled out its services amid the announcement of a dozen such Latin American partnerships with regional Telefónica Movistar divisions.

SpinVox will be partnering with regional in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela in a series of deployments to take place between now and September. In Brazil, the service will be offered through Vivo, Telefónica’s joint venture with Portugal Telecom.

The deal comes on the heels of a similar October 2008 offering in Chile that saw SpinVox’s service deployed over Telefónica’s Movistar carrier. All of the rollouts will be network service deployments—that is, immediately available service-wide. Customers will not be required to pay an additional fee to use the service initially.

“Everybody will be on SpinVox—125 million,” says Jonathan Simnett, global communications director for SpinVox.

According to Simnett, the deals will give access to nearly half of the Latin American market with key segments in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.

SpinVox’s recent spate of announcements has come not only from Latin America, but North America and Australia as well—and all this amid the worst global economic recession in decades. Despite tighter credit markets, SpinVox has managed to open a number of new offices and attract high profile hires around the world.

“We’ve always been a global player from day one—and we have the funding to match,” says Simnett. “We were the top company invested in, in Europe.”

The financial status of the company, however, is difficult to assess with certainty. SpinVox is a private company and, as such, is not required to make its earning public. Since the recession, however, Simnett asserts that SpinVox has not had to change its strategy at all. He seems to suggest, on the contrary, that his company cannot change direction, that its very proposition is dependent on transnational expansion.

“The telecommunications industry is a global industry. It doesn’t segment,” he says. “In order to do this we knew we would have to play globally.”

On that count, Simnett claims there will be a number of announcements in the coming months. He expects signed carrier deals in North America to be made public in the next month or two, describes negotiations in the Asia-Pacific Rim, claims there are agreements Middle East in the signing stage, and makes reference to anticipated announcements in Russia.