After a few weeks of heavy advertising and promotions, Aircel finally set its shop in Mumbai. Along with vodafone, Airtel, Idea, Loop, Reliance and Tata, Aircel is now the seventh service provider in the spectrum. On the launch, Gurdeep Singh, COO, Aircel, said, “The opportunity for a seventh player to come from behind is to not be a one-sided heavily loaded but to provide a composite bouquet so one is deep understanding of consumer, segmenting them very well and putting a 360 degree around the product and the proposition offered to them.”
In other words, Aircel is looking at the value game and not quite at undercutting the market with price wars, which the preceding entrant to the GSM arena Reliance has begun. Aircel on the other hand is betting big on VAS and localized content including a WAP portal in Hindi (why not Marathi? Oh wait it is Mumbai not Maharashtra) for GPRS handset along with services such as music on demand, CRBT (calling back ring tone) and an innovative voice based doctor-on-call services. The idea as Mr.Singh explains is to encourage subscribers to spend more on heavy data usage — this it believes will push average revenue per user higher and save it from the bloodbath in the pricing fight.
There are quite a few obstacles in front of Aircel that a compartively late entrant faces, save alone a competitive market like Mumbai. The price game is effectively targeted at the lower rung of the mobile market who purely use cell phones for voice services and nothing else, given that logic the business model Aircel is planning to adopt is quite sound.
However, the problem in that case is that most of the high end users i.e those who use VAS as much as Aircel wants to are already on with other service providers. And as we have blogged quite often, changing numbers is a big hassle for a lot of such users, which is again a reason why MNP is so much in demand. If MNP does happen this year, then in my opinion Idea and Aircel (if its brand image fits well into the idea that it promotes) can be the biggest gainers with a lot of the people Aircel is targetting more likely to switch.
Aircel is reportedly planning to shell around 1,100 crores as its investment in gaining its business in Mumbai. All in all it can be a pretty interesting few months ahead especially on the Mobile VAS counter. It is also been reported that new operators Datacom, Swan, Unitech and Loop Telecom are also expected to enter Mumbai as and when they start operations.
This joker Gurdeep, after getting Kicked out from BPL, Panasonic & Hutch, is now trying to fool Aircel and in process make enough money so he can peacefully retire like his mentor, the ex-kelvinator boss.