By Jayakishore Bayadi

Bangalore: It was chilling cold outside. But it could not deter the enthusiasm of tehies who attended Mobile Monsoon held at IIM Bangalore on last the weekend of September month.

Prof.Dr.Sridhar Varadarajan, Professor in Information Management at the Management Development Institute, delivered inaugural keynote. While speaking on current challenges and opportunities in Indian mobile VAS space, he said that India today has the lowest tariff for voice calls in the world. However, interesting fact is that usage of mobile call minutes is increasing but ARPU is declining. ARPU in India is one of the lowest in the world today.

India remains a fascinating mobile market and possesses huge opportunity for VAS. Recent growth has exceeded the expectations, and the regulator’s enthusiastic predictions for future market development seems great. Growth will largely come from rural areas going forward. For operators this means significant network investments and lower call charges in order to make mobile communications affordable for the majority of consumers. But can operators continue to perform in this environment beyond this initial acquisition phase? And as ARPU reaches new lows, will they be able to invest for growth? Along with that, Will they be able to face the competition? Today no single operator is dominating the market. Competition is inevitable for them. So, managing ARPU levels while countering the competition is the key challenge for the operators, said Sridhar.

Sridhar said that last month 9.2 million mobile subscribers were added to the total subscribers base in India. Though growth numbers are exciting mobile VAS is still in an infancy stage. Because of the low adoption rate and lack of promotion conducive ecosystem. If you take urban India population it is 320 million, out of which 240 million have mobile phones and teledensity is 85 percent. And most them are have access to cable TV (80million) DTH, Internet. 70% of India is rural. Considering low PC penetration and lower internet/broadband penetration, the mobile has the potential to emerge as the content and communication platform for rural India. Rural India has population of around 850 million with mobiles 63 million and teledensity 8.5 percent.

Hence each of this sectors choice, tastes and needs are different as different categories of adopters differ by social and economic status, affinity to risk, custom made VAS services have to be delivered. So, player’s success lies in catering to the interests of the users and in understanding the lead users, he said.

He also said that VAS players could look at disadvantaged segment of life. In India there are 116.11 million visually impaired people, while 280 million people with disability of hearing loss. They want connectivity, mobility, and community. Hence mobile firms can offer technology platform or services pertaining to them.

He also iterated that forthcoming 3G deployments would create huge opportunity for mobile VAS. Understanding the needs of the user and collaborating to compete is the only way to gain success in the extremely competitive mobile market, he said.