VAS Market size

Posted on | August 31, 2005 |

Arun Gupta of Mauj, which happens to be one of the top content intermediary companies in the VAS space, puts the size of the market at about Rs 380 crore, and projects it to grow to around Rs 3500 crore by 2010, reports the Financial Express.

“Revenue from the VAS segment is growing at a rate of 30 to 40 % a year…
VAS is between 5 to 12% of an operator’s total revenues now,” says Gupta of Mauj.

What is unclear in the above figures is the definition of VAS. Value-Added-Services can be categorised into three. To get fair idea of the market size it is necessary to know how many of these three are included.

1. Voice - Roaming, Voicemail, Call Management Services
2. SMS - P2P, Premium short-code SMS
3. GPRS - Ringtones, Wallpapers, Themes, Games, Internet, Email

The article then talks about roaming solutions provider Roamware which enables carriers such as BSNL, Idea, MTNL, Hutch, Reliance.

Given that annual roaming revenues globally exceed $50 billion, the market size is estimated to be at least $700 million in India,” adds Punnoose.

It also mentions SmartTrust which is a provider of SIM toolkit technology that allows operators to build interactive menus on a SIM card containing links to services such as news, horoscopes, mobile banking etc.

SIM toolkit technology has been around for some time now but customer acceptance of it has been lacklustre. To be fair, Airtel’s Trak Ur Mate which was launched as a SIM Toolkit application in 2002 was alleged to have met with success.

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