Bharti Airtel enjoys a clout that is hard to dismiss as India’s largest mobile service provider. So when it makes its global aspirations clear it becomes imperative that the services aligned with its interest also has new dimensions to look at. With nearly 90 million subscribers Airtel is the prime mover for the mobile VAS industry in India as well. Interestingly, since last year Airtel has been making its global plans evident with acquisition bids, new target markets and more recently couple of high profile international hires.
My question today is, will Bharti’s global ambitions boost the Indian Mobile VAS industry?
With amongst the lowest call rates in the world, services provider’s like Airtel have banked heavily on Value Added Services to boost their revenues. In fact Airtel was among the first to launch Caller Tunes in India, one of the highly adopted Value service in India. Airtel is unique in the sense that it’s business model is primarily built on outsourcing (the actual mobile service). Likewise, while it has it’s own VAS tool like Airtel Live, it also has tie ups with prominent VAS providers to provide value added content to subscribers.
Though the blogosphere isn’t the perfect sample, it can act as a minor research tool, and it suggests that VAS content that Airtel can bring is as anticipated as the lower caller rates among Sri Lankans. And considering Airtel is targeting emerging markets globally which have shown consumption for Indian entertainment content, there are signs that the Indian VAS industry can bet big on the service provider’s international growth.
However, on the other hand, mVAS especially if you take the example of the Indian market has been primarily driven by localized content. Bookmyshow, Asklaila and Bharatmatrimony being examples of indigenous local content VAS. So it wouldn’t be a hard call to expect the same with these markets as well. In such a scenario content like Cricket and Bollywood which are inherent to India but have a wide base in emerging markets and utility services like bill pay can make the most of the global spread of Bharti. On the other hand local content providers like Bookmyshow and AskLaila might not be able to tap into the same breadth of volume.
What do you think the scope of Indian VAS players can scale with the growth Indian mobile service providers?
I have taken Airtel as the crux of this question simply because it is the biggest provider in India, and the fact that it is a home grown company looking at the global market, unlike Vodafone which is a case in point for a completely opposite scenario. And for convenience’s sake I have stuck to the GSM operators.
I don’t think Bharti Airtel will help Indian mVAS market to grow. It seems their current priority is the growth in subscriber base. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been putting roadblocks in the 3G auction.
MVAS market will grow with the entrepreneurship eco-system being created in India. Lot of people are jumping on this bandwagon. Some may fail, some succeed but ultimately mVAS will certainly grow. For mVAS to be successful, you need lot of localized / personalized content which I think only local companies can provide.
Hey Rohit,
Thanks for the comment.. I agree with you on most things, however wouldn’t a growht in subscriber base which Bharti is targeting automatically benefit mVAS providers.. because even their target market increases.. also they are planning to offer 3G services in Lanka, some say they want to use Sri Lanka as a test bed for 3G before launching it in India..
Good thoughts nevertheless.. thanks again.