The Indian telecommunications market is among the fastest in the world and projections show that this year, despite the recession, the number of mobile phone users will grow by 30%, to around 450 million by the end of the year. That was pretty good reason why Deutsche Telekom AG, the German based telecom group invested close to USD 75 million in Devdas Multimedia, a satellite-based multimedia services company from Bangalore to acquire a 17% stake.
The company has now recently announced that they shall take the partnership with Devdas multimedia further to provide Internet services through high capacity radio networks as well. The service shall be operational from 2010 in the metropolitan areas.
An offering of internet coupled with telecommunications makes natural business sense to Deutsche Telekom. Most of the existing internet service providers are basically telecom operators, and extending their service portfolio will help them leverage both their businesses better.
Their launch is still a few months away, but I cannot stop speculating what their business strategy would be? Low cost, like BSNL cannot be a strategy since they have to play the value game and not go for volumes, naturally because they are a late entrant and the volumes in India lie outside the metros.
But playing a premium brand is not easy. In my opinion, the Indian consumer is going to be indifferent to German brands since we do not have too many of them here; in which case, the focus should be on some ridiculously high bandwidths which is one segment conspicuously absent on the Indian internet scene.
