Sunday, July 29, 2007

My First Blog

Mobile industry has come a long way in India from 15-10 years ago when having a phone was considered as a status symbol now mobile revolution has changed the face of Indian society forever. In contrast a mobile phone is now a must have commodity among young and the restless population of India.With almost half a billion untapped population and around 6 Million new mobile subscriber additions every month Indian Telco are experiencing unprecedented industry growth. But this enormous growth is purely circumstantial .Indian telecommunication companies are still way behind their international peers in term of quality and service commitments. They are making money because there is no real outside competition and people don't have better choice. They are providing the service on their terms and there is huge bureaucracy and delays involve whenever someone tries to bring any innovation into the system.In rest of the world where voice margins are either evaporating very fast or they have already dried up due to saturation.So all those companies are turning their head to VAS and willing to try anything new that can compensate their drying voice margin.

Indian Telcos should learn from their international peers and work on multi stream revenue generation before its too late. They should create a environment to promote new innovations in VAS and WAP area.Incubation and support of small VAS/WAP oriented start up will have very good long terms effect for these companies. These small company can make their offering very strong and work as a boost shot in their arm when voice margin will reach to a saturation level.With the hope that it will happen soon and telcos will act as a mentor and provide much needed support to all small VAS/WAP startup signing off from Mumbai.
-M

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I admire your initiative at mkhoj. Quite innovative and extremely industry redefining!

With all due respect to your experience at the US Telcos, it is also a fact that US, or for that matter any telco, has serious internal issues around enabling innovation. This is not an Indian telco affliction. It would be more beneficial to let innovation be 'driven' by folks such as yourself and your peers who started mkhoj since you saw an opportunity in the inability of telcos to innovate. Why telcos cannot innovate despite the enormous financial and people resources at their disposal is a great topic for study but another discussion.

Getting telcos involved will likely be a drag on such innovative companies; unless of course that is the preferred exit-strategy for a start-up.

Anonymous said...

http://www.tech2.com/india/news/general/mkhoj-offers-mobile-advertising-in-india/12151/0