Stock markets are plummeting to never seen before lows, real estate plunging down, Nasscom lowered its expectations for IT-BPO to 16-17%, economists slashed the overall country’s growth forecast, period, amid all this the mobile markets don’t seem got affected but on the other hand reporting a record growth, especially the rural mobile market in India. The mobile operators are adding millions of subscribers every month.
Reportedly the mobile-phone has industry recorded more than 10 million new subscribers in December, up from eight million a year earlier. The industry’s overall subscriber base grew 48 per cent in 2008 to 347 million customers and of the 25 million new mobile subscribers added during April 2008 to June 2008, 8 million were from the villages, that is more than 30%.The mobile subscriber base is growing without leaps and bounds.
Bharti Airtel saw its profit in the three months to December 31 climb to 22 billion rupees , up 25 per cent from a year earlier, as it drew in a record number of new subscribers. Overall industry figures to be released later this month are expected to show that new subscriptions in January reached a record 11 million.The demand for cellphones is coming mainly from rural consumers, who typically earn less than $1,000 a year and a large majority of them don’t own a land and don’t have access to any of the land line networks, and the average usage of this cohort has also gone up by 10 percent over the past year to 8.5 hours a month and according to a recent study by US based Yankee group, 62 percent of all the handsets imported cost less than $50.
With saturation in the urban market, growth in Indian mobile market is primarily driven by an increased focus on the rural market, aggressive promotions, and handset bundle offers. With a national penetration rate of less than 30 per cent as of December there is still a lot of untapped demand for mobile in India.
With this un-precedented growth story of rural mobile what makes me muse over is what possibly could be a killer app for this market? Cheap music or something else, do let us know what you think could be a killer app for rural mobile.
