According to the IDC India Mobile Handset Usage Satisfaction Study 2006, Sony Ericsson left behind all other mobile handset brands to grab the No. 1 spot in the handset user’s overall satisfaction, followed by Nokia, LG and Samsung at the No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 spots respectively.

According to this year’s study, current mobile users are willing to spend on an average Rs 7,100 while buying the next handset, which is a shade below as compared to Rs 7500 last year.

“The average amount spent on the current handset is Rs. 4,300; thereby an additional Rs. 2,800 is likely to be spent while upgrading, a good news for mobile handset manufacturers,” said Shailendra Gupta, Manager, User Research, IDC (India) Ltd.

The study also reveals some interesting facts on the mobile handset usage front.

On average a mobile handset is used for less than one hour in a day for voice communication (incoming and outgoing calls) whereas it was more than an hour a year back.

“Reduction in voice usage is due to an increasing number of subscribers being from low spending market segments such as workers and students,” commented Shailendra.

Usage of SMS has increased as compared to last year. An average SMS user sends 6 messages in day, while the number of messages received is slightly higher, at 8 per day. This is due to a number of messages from mobile service providers giving information about various downloads like ring tones, bill information, contests etc. and messages from utility services such as banks, railways, airlines etc.

Integrated Digital Camera, FM Radio and Speaker Phones continue to remain the features which are most likely to drive up-gradation of mobile handsets this year along with MMS, the new entrant to this list. Features like tri-band, Bluetooth, infrared port etc. have also observed growing demand, but are yet to develop any mass appeal according to the study.

The IDC study was conducted on a sample of 3,140 mobile users (both GSM and CDMA) and covered all the four metros and 10 other major cities. Socio-economic category A, B and C respondents were covered in this study.

Nokia India launched its latest music smartphone N91 at a launch function in Chennai.

Mr Gautam Advani, Director, Multimedia, Nokia India, presented the first phone to music composer Mr A.R. Rahman. The phone will cost about Rs 33,000, he said.

The Nokia N91 is part of Nokia’s new media-centric N series:

• 2 megapixel camera
• 4GB hard drive space
• Industry standard 3.5mm headphone jack
• Support for playback of MP3, M4A, AAC, and WMA audio files
• USB 2.0 - so you can just drag and drop your files from PC
• 3G (WCDMA)
• WiFi
• FM radio
• Symbian OS v9.1, Series 60 UI 3rd Edition

Mouth-watering!

Irving Wladawsky-Berger blogs about a talk given by Bharti’s Sunil Mittal at IBM’s 2006 Business Leadership Forum held in Rome.

He explained that, with India’s annual per capita income only a bit over $600, cellular phone service has to be provided for the Indian market at a very low price, around 2 cents a minute or less. The only way to provide telecom services so inexpensively and run a profitable business is to take advantage of India’s large population and economic growth, scaling up the business rapidly by adding many new customers every month.

To do this, Sunil Mittal had to develop a radically innovative business model: focus only on the customers and outsource just about everything else. In other words, put all the energy of the business into attracting, supporting and retaining customers and accept the fact that pretty much everything else has been commoditized and should be outsourced, including managing all the IT equipment and the network. He said there was a lot of resistance to this strategy. People were calling him from around the world saying that IT and the network were the heart of a telecom company. “You cannot give your heart away and then run a business”, they said to him.

Mittal begged to differ, saying the customer, not the technology, was at the heart of his business and then proceeded to implement the strategy. He further confounded everyone by not picking Indian companies as his outsourcing partners, choosing instead IBM to run IT and Nokia and Ericsson to run the network, because he wanted highly experienced, international companies that could keep up with the torrid pace of Bharti’s growth. Today, Bharti is one of the top five companies in India, and Mittal’s vision for it is to be India’s most admired brand by 2010.

Via: Rajesh Jain

Bharti Airtel has capital expenditure plans to the tune of $1.8-2bn for the current financial year.

The funding of the investments would be through internal accruals and any shortfall would be met through borrowings. There are no plans to raise additional equity.

The company aims to expand its network to cover the entire lot of 5,200 census towns in the country this year. At present, it has coverage in about 3,800 census towns.

With respect to the proposed launch of 3G services in the market, Bharti Airtel expected policy issues to be cleared by June and launch of its 3G service in the current financial year itself.

Announcing Bharti’s annual results, Sunil Mittal gave an insight into the expansion that took place last year:

“We put up 10,000 new base stations last financial year across the country which was about the same number that we installed cumulatively over the last 11 years put together.”

Bharti is part of 30-issue BSE index and contributes about 2.5% to the total market capitalisation of the Bombay stock exchange after going public in 2002.

Source: ET

Bharti announced its results for FY 2005-06, reporting a 51% rise in net profit to Rs 2258 crore and growth in revenue by 46% over the previous year to Rs 11,663 crore.

With a market capitalisation of Rs 76,000 crore ($16.9 billion), Bharti Tele closed at a price of Rs 407.95 on the BSE.

Bharti’s mobile user base rose 78% on year to 1.96 crore at the end of March, the highest ever net addition of 91 lakh customers in a year. Even during the last quarter, the company added 34 lakh customers, which is also the highest ever in any single quarter. Total users including fixed-line customers — surged 77% to 2.09 crore.

For the year ended March 2006, MTNL registered a 38.3% fall in net profit to Rs 578.67 crore as compared with Rs 938.97 crore a year ago. Total income was down 4.9% for FY06 to Rs 5,785.57 crore as against Rs 6,084.10 crore last year.

While MTNL was allowed a tax refund of Rs 1,233 crore, only Rs 194 crore could be factored in 2005-06, said Anita Soni, director-finance.

She also added that the reduction in the price of leased circuits had resulted in the company losing Rs 92 crore, while ADC reduction led to the loss of Rs 329 crore.

MTNL is in a tight spot - it can’t expand outside Mumbai and Delhi and therefore can’t compete with nationwide service providers who benefit from scale of operations.

The company has also announced that it would form a subsidiary that would primarily look at ways to generate revenues from its real estate assets in addition to looking at ways to tap revenue streams such as expanding beyond Delhi and Mumbai and making the company a global one, Sinha said.

The company has set an ambitious target of increasing its network capacity by 2 million lines, which will be 3G-enabled by the end of this financial year. It also has plans to hike CDMA-based capacity to 8 lakh.

Source: Business Standard

Hutchison Whampoa is believed to have offered to buy the Hinduja group’s 5.11% stake in India’s 4th largest operator Hutchison Essar for $400m, according to ET.

A value of $400m for a 5% stake would thus mean a current valuation of $8 bn for Hutchison Essar. If the entity is subsequently listed, and the market valuation is higher than $8bn, then Hutchison is believed to have offered a further $50m to the Hindujas.

In other words, if on listing the company has a valuation of, for example, $12bn, then 5per cent of this would come to $600m. The Hindujas would thus get $50m from the ‘extra’ $200m, under the deal said to have been proposed by Hutchison.

The Hinduja are not in a hurry to sell as they know that the Essar group is equally keen on increasing its stake in Hutchison Essar. The Hinduja group is looking at a valuation of at least $12bn for Hutchison India.

The current holding in Hutchinson Essar is as follows:

• The Ruias hold around 33%
• Hutchison Whampoa directly holds 10%
• Hutchison Telecommunications (HTIL) holds another 25%
• Orascom holds about 20% stake in HTIL, thus indirectly owns 4%
• Company’s MD Asim Ghosh and Max Healthcare’s Analjit Singh hold 11%
• The public has 17%

VAS solution provider Cellebrum has tied up with operators like Idea, Spice and Reliance Telecom at the national level and is also running a pilot programme for Airtel for its landline services in the Madhya Pradesh Circle. Over 170,000 Idea and Spice subscribers have tried the BGM service till now.

With Background Music, you can have accompanying music during phone conversations for ambience while chatting. In order to use the service, the user needs to dial a prefix (say 234) before the phone number, for the call to be connected with the Music M-vironment (BGM). Without the prefix, the call will be connected as a normal phone call. Users can always change background sound at will by dialling provided IVRS (Interactive Voice Response Services) Interface.

Cost of using the service varies from operator to operator. There are three kind of charges — the activation charge, the chosen background song and per minute cost of the song.

This solution is different from CRBT solution, where music is played before the call is connected. In BGM, music is played after the call is connected. Technically, it is a conference service, which involves the calling party, called party and the music playing entity, which is also, part of the conference. This entity is responsible for playing back music during the conversation.

The limitation of the service is that the caller has to be within the coverage area of the home network, as it is an IVR based service and will not be accessible outside home network.

Thinking of analogies, I feel the service is similar to IMVironments in Yahoo Messenger chat. You can choose different Background Music for different numbers, play expression like press 1 to play a child crying sound or press 3 for a glass crashing sound (showing the person on the other line has broken your heart etc.)

I am excited about the idea of the service and am keen to see its market acceptance. It has couple of elements common with a hit service like CRBT.

• It is network based, so the user does not have to download any app to use the service (unlike videotones).
• It is a tool to show-off or express yourself and therefore clicks with teenagers.

Related: Licence to lie

The latest cover story of India’s top business magazine Business World is on Mobile VAS. Needless to say that these are boom times for the Indian mobile VAS industry. Rediff has syndicated the story and its a must read. Have captured some salient points.

The article cites a Lehman Brothers report which puts the size of the industry at Rs 2300 crores. This includes texting and is not just operator share. By 2010, the report estimates mobile data to be a $10-billion (Rs 43,000-crore) market in India. The report says that EBITDA from data revenue could go up to 65%, compared to 30% or so from voice.

To put things into perspective, India has 108 million homes with TV, 90 million mobile users and 7.5 million Internet subscribers.

So whats all this fuss about mobile entertainment.

Indian Idol got more than 55 million votes via SMS between Nov 04 to Mar 05. At Rs 3 per SMS, that is Rs 16.5 crore (Rs 165 million). The telecom companies made Rs 11.5 crore (Rs 115 million), and Sony about Rs 5 crore (Rs 50 million).

Radio Mirchi gets 40,000-45,000 SMSes a day.

Indian music industry got about Rs 140 crore (Rs 1.40 billion) or 20% of its legitimate revenues from mobile music in 2005.

Shridhar Subramaniam, MD, Sony-BMG says a hit film can generate Rs 1-1.2 crore - about 5% of an album’s sale on mobile revenues. Its big mobile hit of the year is Rang De Basanti.

Saregama makes half its money on ringtones through its catalogue. It “sells nothing but ringtones. With new releases, we have the rights to images and wallpapers”, says Sarkar.

The big media firms — Star, Sony and BCCL, among others — have set up entire divisions for mobile entertainment.

Star CEO Peter Mukerjea has maintained that mobile telephony should eventually bring in 30% of the company’s revenues. And Sony will set up its own backend for digital downloads this year.

Of Reliance’s 18 million subscribers, more than 10 million use data regularly. Roughly half its data revenues comes from film-related content.

• At the end of December 2005 R World, its mobile portal had 5.3 million visitors.
• About 32% of the portal’s revenues came from ringtones and 20% from films.
• Games and cricket form a respectable 8-9 per cent each.

What worked for Mobile VAS in India.

Most Indians use the mass transport system like the Japanese and unlike the Americans who drive cars to work.

Customers are cool with paying for information on the mobile unlike the Internet.

Mobile phone is bridging the digital divide (that the Internet was supposed to)
in smaller towns and villages for entertainment and information.

India has collecting societies - the Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) and Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL). According to rates prescribed by PPL, anywhere between 25-40% comes back to music firms.

The media companies are not the ones to be left behind.

For media buying and planning firms such as Group M, all the work with mobile phones is “brand centric,” says Tushar Vyas, its national director (interaction).

That means that if Fa’s creative and media plan demands that there should be a mobile play, say, a contest, poll or plain branding, then Group M will look at content or partnerships where it can promote Fa on the mobile phone.

Advertisers are trying their best to get their two bits in. So, Thums Up has a game it designed with Mobile2Win, Castrol has its own ringtone (and 100,000 people actually downloaded it), and Reliance offers bill payment on R World, railway bookings, and even exam results.

Can any article on mobile entertainment be complete without a mention of the ongoing feud between the operators and aggregators on revenue shares.

Currently, the Indian market is split roughly at 60:30:10 between mobile operators, media companies and aggregators. Mobile operators argue that they make the investment and control the consumer, so they should keep a lion’s share of the mobile data pie.

Prasad of Reliance says that internationally, operators pay revenue share only on the basis of actual downloads. In India, the figure on which this is calculated includes network usage and subscription fee and, therefore, the percentage that comes back to the operator has to be larger.

Ultimately, in a fragmented, oversupplied content market, it should be easy to get good stuff if you have a sense of what will work and what won’t. Media companies have a nose for it, mobile companies don’t.

So, as the need for differentiated content, especially with TV, songs, news and more audio-visual content becoming important, expect much more poaching from programming departments of TV channels, and lots and lots of loose alliances.

Some quotable quotes:

Viren Popli, senior vice-president, (interactive), Star India
“The VCR gave back to consumers the concept of time; the mobile will give them back the concept of space. You can consume entertainment when you want and where you want it.”

Raj Singh, director, Activemedia Technology
“Only 60 million people know English. Hindi is where the eyeballs are”

Hemant Sachdev, director (marketing and communications), Bharti Tele-Ventures
“The Indian consumer is willing to pay a premium for VAS”

Other notable facts:

India has one of the lowest spectrum allocation per GSM operator in the world, about 6 Mhz against, over 25 in the UK or over 20 in China.

Just 15-20% of the phones in India have colour screens and/or cameras.

The effective rate per minute has moved from Rs 1.50 to Re 0.95, while costs per minute have been chopped from Rs 1.25 to Re 0.87 on its way to becoming Rs 0.8.

Telecom retailing is attracting the biggies. Soon after Bangalore-based MobileNXT launched its first store in Gurgaon, players like Pantaloon Retail and Essar Group are also reported to be in the fray.

Leveraging its already-established presence in the retail space, Pantaloon Retail recently launched its telecom outfit Convergem Retail India Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Pantaloon Retail India Ltd.

It plans to launch 40 stores by June. Along with mobile phone services, the retail outfit would also cater to landline solutions, IT products and other communication needs of a consumer. Investments of around Rs 100 crore has been earmarked for the venture.

“Convergem Retail plans to follow a three-pronged strategy. Shop in shop with their Big Bazaar stores, independent brand stores, and kiosks in malls, multiplexes and the metro catering to impulse buying, under three brand names M Bazaar, M Port and Gen M respectively,” says Neeran Chibber, president and CEO, Convergem Retail.

The Essar group is said to have earmarked around Rs 1,500 crore for the new multi-branded telecom retail chain initiative over the next five years.

Also Read: Prashant Singh’s comment on MobileNxt
Source: ET

ET reports that operators are keen to spread their presence in Jammu and Kashmir due to strong demand for cellphones there. The demand is driven not only by local residents, but also by defence personnel posted in the tough terrain.

There are three operators in the state - BSNL, Airtel and Aircel. Hutch is keen to enter the state soon. BSNL has 415 sites across J&K, out of which around 30 are in villages close to the LoC in Poonch, Baramulla, Kupwara, Doda and other areas. Bharti Tele-Ventures has around 300 sites while Aircel (recently acquired by Malaysian company Maxis) has 190 cell sites.

The areas close to the LoC, still exposed to cross-border infiltration, are now on the radar of telecom operators. Telcos are setting up base stations in villages that are 3 km to 5km from the LoC to meet the fast growing demand for mobile telephony. However, there are no services on or very close to the LoC.

Its a boon for our Jawans to be able to stay in touch with their families.

“Being connected with our home while being hundreds of kilometres away is a dream come true. Though wireline services have been available for many years, it is mobile phones that have revolutionised communication for us,” said an armed forces member in Poonch.

However, putting up telecom infrastructure in these areas is not an easy task.

“We could put up antennas and other equipment only at night in militancy prone areas like Rajouri and Poonch. Firing during day time prevented any work and even at night, labourers have to often stop work due to security risks,” said a telecom company official.

Risks notwithstanding, residents are keen to own cellphones.

“The waiting list for BSNL mobile connections in border villages of J&K is running into thousands. When residents come to know a mobile tower is being set up, they come to help officials in the hope of getting faster connections,” said the official.

Sometime back I had blogged about Paradox Studios’ strategy of developing games around wellknown brands and personalities.

After developing games starring Hollywood actor Van Damme, Paradox has signed up with the legendary football star Baichung Bhutia to create Mobile game titles based on the popular Indian football icon. The games will be a mix of strategy, skill and speed and will even feature some of Bhutia’s signature moves for football fans.

Its good to see an Indian company going beyond cricket for a sports game. Though brands can act as initial crowd-pullers, a game has to stand on its own for it to be a hit. So who’s taking Advantage Sania - a sure shot crowd puller.

Priya Saini writes in Economic Times on moblogging.

What’s more, moblogging complements traditional blogging perfectly. Traditionally blogging, done from a PC, is mostly text-based and requires more time to create. It is usually used for publishing thoughts and opinions, while moblogging is much more spontaneous and usually visual-based.

The article quotes me:

Says Veerchand Bothra, of Blogstreet.com, India’s first portal on blogs, “Since mobloggers are not tied to a desktop, mobile blogging is contextual in nature and can be done as and when the idea strikes or an event takes place.

You don’t have to wait to go back to the desktop. For most people, writing does not come naturally. But everyone can take a photo or record a video with a mobile.

Many bloggers are maintaining moblogs using sites like flickr.com, textamerica.com etc. But the uptake of mobile blogging is not linked with the popularity of blogs. In countries like India, where the PC base is not large, there will be more moblogs than blogs,” points out Bothra.

I believe moblogging is different from blogging as an activity. For the vast majority of people - writing does not come naturally. But everyone can take a photo or record a video through the mobile. This is also because it is easier to create multimedia on mobiles than text.

Nokia recently launched M-Blog, a mobile blogging application for its Series 60 smartphones in India. The article also talks about it.

Nokia’s new M-Blog application will not just enable bloggers to share their moments instantly but will also open up a whole new paradigm to the blog universe. It’s no more just shoot-show-throw.

Shyam Sundar, Business Manager, Imaging solutions, Nokia India

With Nokia M-Blog, we are providing consumers an exciting mode of sharing their world, with the world

Nokia M-Blog is a free application that enables you to upload, view and share photos taken on your GPRS enabled Nokia camphones.

You can download the application by sending an SMS with the text MBLOG to 5555. You will get back a WAP Push message containing a URL to download the application.

You can choose the images to upload, add description for the images and then click upload. The images will be uploaded to your blog.

You could view your blog by Clicking on “My Blog” in the application. You could also view your blog by logging on to www.nokiamblog.in.

You can share your blog by clicking on the “share” button from the application’s menu and entering their mobile number or e-mail ID. Your friends can add their comments on the images.

Reliance Infocomm has always touted its CDMA network’s data advantage over GSM operator’s GPRS offering. There is no doubt that Reliance’s CDMA2000 1x network is better suited for carrying data traffic than most GPRS capable networks of GSM operators in India.

But here is the irony - Reliance has the right data technology but wrong customer base. It entered the market late as an operator and by then the cream of users was already taken by the likes of Hutch and Airtel. With lack of international roaming on CDMA networks and absence of number portability, there is very little reason for the top end users to move to Reliance. On the other hand, GSM operators have the customer base capable of using and paying for better data offerings but their GPRS networks are too slow. And they are too busy acquiring new customers to waste time in upgrading their existing networks to EDGE. Besides there is a dearth of necessary spectrum also.

This is validated by COAI secretary general TV Ramachandran’s statement in this Business Standard article on Reliance’s data (mobile and broadband) plans.

Sure Reliance’s main thrust has been on data, but their revenue from non-voice services as a part of their total revenue is half of that of the leading GSM players.

Non-voice (VAS) revenues of GSM operators is believed to be around 10% and a large part of that is P2P SMS (7% approx.) alone. According to TVR’s statement, Reliance’s VAS revenues comes to 5% of total and P2P SMS should be taking lion’s share of that 5%. So what does it leave for non-P2P SMS VAS revenues - R World video clips et al - which Reliance claims high usage of.

Reliance’s advantage is its ubiquitous data network and pervasive availability of R World. I would recommend a Reliance data card for your laptop because of its nationwide data network, sensibly priced data plans and workable speed of connection.

It currently has its network available in over 2.4 lakh towns and villages across the country constituting for 42 per cent of the rural population. But by the end of the year, it wants to nearly double the rural coverage to four lakh villages - about 50 per cent of the rural population.

That is far more ambitious that the best GSM player in the marketplace. For instance, according to Cellular Operators Association of India(COAI), coverage of the most aggressive GSM player in villages is around 1-1.5 lakh (much lower than Reliance) and is expected to hit about three lakh by the end of this year. However, if Bharti figures are anything to go by, till December last year it had reached over 58000 villages and non-census towns around the country.

But to cater to the rural market would need specialised content apart from the popularity of entertainment (movie clips, song downloads, etc). The company has already worked out a bevy of such services - like online price of cops in mandis, weather report at local levels and of course introduction of virtually all the regional languages to surf information.

• Customer base: 18 million
• Number of data enabled phones: 10 million
• Wireless traffic per day: 320 million minutes
• Wireless multimedia users 5.3 million
• Coverage: 3700 census towns and 240000 non-census towns and villages
• Rural population covered: 42%
• Urban population covered: 97%

ET reports that Bangalore-based Mobile VAS company OnMobile is looking to raise a second round funding of $100 million. CEO & founder, Arvind Rao confirmed that company is in the process of raising money but did not reveal details.

The estimated value of the company is $270 million. OnMobile is believed to have an annual revenue of about $50m, so the valuation is more than five times its revenue.

Infosys incubated the company 4-5 years ago and has around 12% stake in the company. Other investors include venture fund Argo Global Capital Partners, whose investors include France Telecom Deutsche Telecom, and Singapore Telecom.

Most of the $100m being sought will be used to fund the company’s future growth and expansion, while a small portion is expected to be used to purchase one of the existing investors. The identity of the seller could not be ascertained but sources said it is not Infosys.

OnMobile is a leader in voice based VAS platforms. Voice portals of most Indian operators are powered by OnMobile’s technology. The company is trying to make inroads in other delivery channels like WAP/GPRS and becoming a “end-to-end” VAS solution provider. Competitors include IMI Mobile, Cellebrum, Mauj.

$100 million is a lot of money. With this kind of moolah, OnMobile can not only strenghten its offerings but also buyout other players. Indian mobile VAS industry is hotting up with a spate of investments. Mauj received $10 million from WestBridge Capital Partners, Intel Capital and Sequoia Capital this year. Nazara, mPortal, Openera, ConvergeLabs have all received funding in the last year.

Visited a Airtel Easy Music shop today. The process is simple and exactly the same as advertised.

• Choose your favourite song from the music catalogue available with the retailer.
• Tell the retailer your choice.
• Retailer will just press a few keys on his phone and download a song (Hello Tunes or Ringtone) to your mobile phone. In the case of Hello Tunes you will be required to dial 674 (tollfree) to confirm acceptance of the song.
• You will also get an SMS confirming the successful download of your song.
• Finally you can pay the retailer for the song and walk out…as simple as that.

I think a Easy Music shop serves two purposes:

• Ringtones for dummies - Remove the complexity out of the process of downloading ringtones and ringbacktones. Thus making it simple for the lowest common denominator to consume the services.
• Discovery - Every Easy Music shop has a catalogue of ringtones and ringbacktones which the user can choose from. This lets the user to search for his favourite song and discover content which is not possible otherwise.

One can choose from two music services - Ringtones or Ringbacktones. But the ringtones are monotones only. And downloading a mono ringtone via SMS shortcodes is not such a difficult process anyways. So there is no big value add that a Easy Music shop does in this case. Though, it does remove the pain for users wanting to set a ringbacktone.

The dealer has an Airtel phone embedded with a SIM-based app. He types in the user’s mobile number and code of the requested ringtone/ringbacktone.

What remains to be seen from a user behaviour point of view is whether the whole experience of going to the shop and buying a ringtone is addictive and becomes a habit like shopping for other goods.

The mobile music industry is set to overtake legal conventional music industry by the end of this financial year, according to the Cellular Operators Association of India.

The size of the conventional music industry is around Rs 700 crore, according to a recent report by FICCI and PWC. By the end of this financial year, the mobile music industry is forecasting that it will be worth around Rs 720 crore.

Mobile music, comprising of ringtones, caller ringback tones and music clippings, is registering a growth of 40-50%.

India’s largest operator Airtel has a subscriber base of 20m, out of which six million use mobile music services. During the last financial year, the company registered about 50m downloads.

Airtel recently launched Easy Music services, in which its subscribers can visit the 100,000 Easy Music outlets and choose their favourite music from catalogue. The company has 18,000 songs in 20 languages.

What is the current size of Indian VAS market at end of the fiscal, considering mobile music alone accounts for 720 crores. Previous estimates put the total size of the industry around 500 crores.

Source: ET

MobileNXT, India’s first retail chain specialising in mobile products and services will be launched in Gurgaon within a week, reports DNA.

The concept stores will offer a complete range of handsets from top five brands, 100 accessories, after sales services, value added services, data transfer facilities and an exchange programme. They will also have kiosks from which music, ringtones and wallpapers can be downloaded, he said.

Romy Juneja, Founder and COO, MobileNXT, says the Bangalore headquartered company is being backed by a consortium of investors with $5 million investment.

According to founder and CEO Vijay Menon, the chain store model in telecom business is proven globally.

• In the first year, 31 stores will be opened, followed by 97 in the second and 170 in the third year.
• A Rs 380 crore turnover is our business plan for the third year.
• Primary focus will be on Tier-II and Tier-III cities.

I think the company has identified a definite business opportunity as the Indian mobile user is indeed underserved as far as the after sales service is concerned. The average lifetime of a mobile is 18-24 months and if the chain manages to keep the customer happy, he will continue to give business by way of service fees, accessory sales and handset upgrades. Mobile content and other VAS offer the upside to such businesses. The key to success in any service business is customer service and responsiveness to his needs.

It also remains to be seen if the strategy and execution succeed in making it a viable business and how do they address the following issues.

• Capital expenditure required for setting up a nationwide retail chain
• Choice of retail route - in Malls, Superstores or Shopping area
• Thinning of margins on hardware
• Cost of human-support and service

Avaya IP Telephony Seminar

Date: 18 April 2006, Tuesday
Venue: The Grand, New Delhi

Date: 20 April 2006, Thursday
Venue: The Leela Palace, Bangalore

Date: 21 April 2006, Friday
Venue: Grand Hyatt, Mumbai

The Mobile Enterprise: Convergence & Mobility Strategies 2006

Date: 20 April 2006, Thursday
Venue: The Leela Kempinski, Mumbai

Forum Nokia India Tech Day

Date: 26 April 2006, Wednesday
Venue: Taj Palace Hotel, New Delhi

This had to catch on. It was a no-brainer. In a time where companies are scrambling to grab every second of your attention and never wanting to miss a branding opportunity - why would they loose a captive audience of callers. ET reports that companies are using their catchiest jingles and ad punchlines as caller ringback tones for their executives.

Call any Ford India executive on his mobile phone and you’ll be greeted with the company’s ‘Go Fida’ campaign for the just-launched Fiesta model as a caller ring back tone.

Call a Videocon executive and you’ll hear the company’s ubiquitous ‘Indian multinational’ punchline. Call a Hero Honda official and hear the bike market leader’s famous jingle. Ditto for ICICI and Kotak Mahindra.

Says Naveen Chopra, chief marketing officer at Hutchison Essar:

“It depends on the deal, if the corporate client wants its ad jingle we incorporate it as a caller ring back tone for the connections that we provide.”

Companies say ring tone marketing is also a focused way to get mindshare among business associates. Says Pankaj Desai of Kotak Mahindra:

“Most of the time the people who call me are my business associates. This ring tone gets their mindshare because it’s the first thing they notice and appreciate.”

As of now it is restricted to company’s executives - but it could well develop into yet another viral marketing tool for marketers.