Telecom tie-ups and partnership updates are the flavor of the season specially looking at service roll out of new players and frequency of VAS introductions. In latest, MTS has announced their tie-up with Utiba to facilitate better E-recharge facility to its subscribers.
MTS the newest telecom entrant owned by SSTL (Sistema Shyam TeleServices) feels third party e-recharge services are inadequate to meet the requirements of present subscriber base. Its tie-up with Utiba will allow its subscribers to top-up their mobile connection with any amount they wish to avail.
According to Mr. Vsevolod Rozanov, President and Chief Executive officer, SSTL said, “we want to create a strong customer propositions for our services based on cutting edge technology and business processes.India has a large pre-paid base and an Electronic top-up platform will play a significant role.”
MTS evens aims to provide basic set-up for future m-commerce play as Utiba can also handle financial services like bill payments and P2P money transfer through its U-Bank platform. MTS currently has over 3 million subscribers with license to provide telecom services in 22 circles in India.
Numerous small time telecom retailers have started using third party solutions to top-up mobiles due to increase of telecom players. This helps them avoiding the hassles of stocking multiple recharge services. MTS tie-up will thus find limited adaptability in the beginning as retailers may not prefer to own the separate e-recharge set-up for just one single operator.
BSNL in Distribution tie-up with NFL
This tie-up might seem weird at first but is a step to push up rural telephony in India. BSNL has inked a distribution deal with NFL(National Fertilizer Limited) to push its services through their rural based distribution network.
The distribution tie-up entails BSNL to sell recharge vouchers,mobile connections and GSM data cards through the distribution network of NFL. The tie-up would even be extended to provide additional VAS services like daily mandi prices, farm and agriculture related updates in future. BSNL would be training NFL dealers and would first pilot test the project in state of Madhya pradesh and chattishgarh.
According to Kuldeep Goyal, BSNL chairman and managing director “With our new strategic alliance with NFL, we reinforce and further strengthen our commitment to bridge the rural-urban digital divide and meeting the information needs of the rural consumer,”
BSNL was recently overtaken by Idea in terms of subscriber count and this surely has made them sit up and leverage their strength in rural India. Despite near 100 per cent tele-density in urban India, rural telecom penetration (at 16%) still seem to be neglected from the telecom growth panned out in recent years.
