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me_saket

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  4. Posted · Report reply

    With such poor stategy how can virgin gain 5omillion subsriber.

    Bussiness-standard

    Mumbai May 08, 2009, 0:17 IST

    year ago, Virgin Mobile, the Indian arm of UK-based industrialist Richard Branson’s aviation and communication group, entered India as a franchisee of Tata Teleservices. In a first, Virgin designs, markets and services Tata’s offerings for the youth. Hit by the recent regulatory changes in telecommunications, M A Madhusudan, India head, talks to I****a Russell about the reduction in termination charges and the road ahead for the company, now that it has completed a year in the country. Edited excerpts:

    How was the first year?

    We don’t reveal our subscriber base because there will be double counting of figures since they’re already included in Tata Teleservices’ numbers; every customer we bring in is counted as a Tata customer. However, our subscriber base is definitely more than a million.

    What is the addressable market for you?

    Of the total telecom market of approximately 300 million, 45 per cent is the existing youth segment or existing user base, plus there are 50 million more that are expected to join this segment in the next three years including this year. However, we are focused only on the urban youth. So, effectively it is 17-18 per cent of the entire market. At present, 70 per cent of our subscribers are existing users of mobiles. this means less than 1million possibly 0.8million only :NOTriste:

    You came with the offer of paying 10 paise a minute for incoming calls. Now that the regulator has reduced termination charges, how will you cope?

    It has definitely affected our margins. However, the effect is not much, since our outgoing and incoming is almost equal. So if my 30 paise have gone down, my outflow has increased by the same amount. Our overall calls were initially more towards incoming tariff offering, since typically we have kids and college goers on our profile, people who give missed calls for other people to call back. But now it is neutralised.

    Everyone is focusing on the youth.

    We won’t diversify and dilute the property of the brand. Even after a lot of brands floating in the market, we have 87 per cent recall in a span of one year, and some of the brands don’t even figure in the youth segment. So despite all other operators in the market we are being seen as a youth brand. We don’t have any ambitions of dominating the market, we started this venture only to address a particular segment, which is not being addressed by one of the stakeholders. and this is future of india telecom biz, soon airtel rcom will come out with brands that focus only perticular segment, like blackberry :winko: .

    Now that MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) are allowed, would you consider a plunge?

    We are not tempted, given the way MVNOs are being implemented in India. With three more operators coming in, there will not be enough space for an MVNO to try for an urban market. How can virgin decide future for upcoming MVNO???? :confuse:

    How much competition do you foresee in the urban markets?

    Any new entrant will have to make a lot of investments in infrastructure. We are working on an existing infrastructure, only adding to it. We have already found economies of scale that normally a new entrant would find hard to achieve. We will be able to compete with any new brand that comes into the market.

    Tata is entering GSM. Will you come along? What about 3G?

    Our partnership with TTSL is not technology-dependent, it is only a brand. So we have the opportunity to go for GSM. They will take time to establish their GSM network so we have time to take decisions. It definitely opens up much larger options. We would definitely be excited about 3G. Whenever it comes, we would be ready with our offering. We will not bid individually for 3G.

    Do you have plans of getting into other forms of data connection?

    We’ve just made an entry into the data space with USB dongles and data cards. We will not make much hype about this. We will go through our normal channel; it’s an add-on product. We want to provide a complete package to the consumers to cater to all their needs, this is not specific to the youth market.

    Where is data card? why did u focused on other segment and diverting ur biz plans to attract youths :Equivocado:

  7. Posted · Report reply

    Hey Get the Newly Launched LG RD 3530...

    It is great phone @Rs.1300....

    I had a look at the handset at a nearby Reliance Communications oulet. Beautiful and a cute looking handset!!!

    A smart handset for basic handset lovers..........

    Anybody used it? Any user reviews????

    lg 3500

    rate here 900/-

    ahmedabad

    there is differnce in model number

    3500 or 3530

  12. Posted · Report reply

    loop mobile site not updated

    http://www.loopmobile.in/index.htm

    Loop Telecom did a soft launch of its services in Chennai and Orissa circles on Monday. Among the new telecom operators who were given licences in the recent past, Loop is the second one to launch in Chennai circle after MTS, a CDMA service provider jointly promoted by Shyam Telecom and Russia’s Sistema.

    Loop Telecom’s parent company, Loop Mobile, has presence in the Mumbai circle with around 21.6 lakh subscribers as on March 31, as per data provided by Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), an association of GSM service providers in India.

    Loop Telecom will offer services in Chennai and other circles under the same brand as that in Mumbai viz “Loop Mobile.” According to a media release issued by the company, it will launch in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala by mid-June.

    It’s not known as to how Loop is funding its national roll-out when its ownership and funding are being investigated by the ministry of company affairs and its parent is the subject of an arbitration dispute between the Essar group and Vodafone. When asked if Loop’s launch in other circles would have any impact on the arbitration, a Vodafone Essar spokesperson said, “The arbitration is only for the company’s Mumbai operations.”

    The Ruia-promoted Essar Group, with interests in steel and shipping businesses, owns around 9.9 per cent stake in Loop Telecom. Essar Group has 33 per cent stake in Vodafone Essar, a private GSM service provider with pan-India presence. Sanjeev Chachondia, chief executive officer, Loop Telecom said, “We are at present testing our services and products in Tamil Nadu and Orissa. Subseq-uently, we will roll out a wider range of network coverage and services.”

    Recently, Loop Telecom had announced placing an order with ZTE, a Chinese company that provides telecom equipment and network services, to supply end-to-end network equipment for roll-out of telecom services.

    http://www.telecomtiger.com/Wireless_fulls...mp;section=S216

  20. Posted · Report reply

    Red rolls out

    Cash-rich Russian telecom major Sistema plans a significant share in the saturated Indian mobile services market.

    Surajeet Das Gupta / New Delhi May 5, 2009, 0:24 IST

    When Russian telecommunications service provider Sistema was planning to bring its international brand, MTS, to India, it was confronted with an odd problem. The symbol for MTS, which Sistema was going to use for the first time outside Russia and the CIS countries, was oval in shape and looked like an egg. The company feared the huge population of vegetarians in India could take offence at it.

    A nervous Sistema then created a focused group of consumers across the country, many of whom were vegetarians, to gauge their response. To the company’s relief, the group gave its nod to the brand and its symbol. It could be sold to vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike.

    It has been a quiet but fundamental change. Last week, Sistema Shyam Teleservices (a joint venture company in which Sistema has a 74 per cent stake and the rest is owned by homegrown Shyam Telecom) painted Pink City Jaipur red — the colour of its brand. The occasion was the change of its CDMA service brand in Rajasthan from Rainbow to MTS. It has launched the brand in Tamil Nadu, Chennai and Kerala too. By June, it will launch MTS in West Bengal, including Kolkata, and in a few short months, in Mumbai and Delhi too. Thus, in the next nine months, the MTS brand will be seen in half of the 24 telecom circles across the country. Sistema has a war chest of over $5.5 billion to give shape to its ambition.

    Rainbow goes red

    So, what has prompted the company to dump Rainbow and use Sistema’s international brand? MTS, mind you, was launched only in 2006 and does not have the same equity as is associated with other global brands like Vodafone, even though it uses the same red colour. Though last week, it was ranked as one of the world’s most powerful brands by Financial Times and market research firm Millward Brown. Sistema, of course, is the eighth-largest telecom company in the world with over 100 million customers.

    The reason is simple: Rainbow was a regional brand limited in appeal to Rajasthan and what the company needed was a pan-India brand name. While it had the option to call it Sistema, research showed that the brand had no special recall in India. So it had to be nothing but MTS. “The most important factor was the time-to-market, how quickly we could launch the brand across India in the next nine months. With MTS, the brand material, logo and specifications were all readymade and already available,” says Sistema Shyam President & CEO Vsevolod Rozanov.

    Rozanov and his team were aware that changes would have to be made in the MTS brand communication to suit the Indian market. The advertising and marketing messages in Russia where it is the market leader was one of leadership and dominance. Things would have to be different in India. “In Russia, our marketing and advertising approach was one of a dominant leader. In India, we are the sixth or seventh operator; so the message has to be friendlier with a human touch,” says Rozanov.

    So, signs and shapes or symbols used in advertising campaigns in Russia became a strict no-no. Instead, it is using faces of models talking on the mobile phone to relate to the consumers and give its service the human touch. It has also decided to concentrate most of its advertising spend on the local media of the region instead of using English. “We have seen that the consumer needs to be explained the product and it is best done through the regional language,” says Rozanov.

    So far, Sistema Shyam has been a marginal player in the ever-expanding Indian telecom service market. It has only 500,000 customers, a majority of them in Rajasthan (it launched in other circles less than a month ago), which is a fraction of the 288 million mobile connections in the country.

    If the company has to grow fast, the message is clear: It has to wean away customers from the incumbents apart from getting new customers (first-time users). In Rajasthan, for instance, the key message of its campaign is to create a churn in the market through the slogan, Badlo life ka plan (Change your life’s plan). At the moment, the company’s plan seems to be working as over 50 per cent of its subscribers are not new customers but those who have switched from other mobile service operators in Rajasthan. “They (these customers) are doing so because they are frustrated with the quality of the old incumbent networks and they are willing to try us as it is a non-congested network,” says Rozanov.

    The CDMA challenge

    Observers see it with skepticism. Is CDMA the right platform to grow in India, they ask? Aren’t large CDMA service operators like Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices moving towards GSM to expand their footprint in the country? Aren’t customers wary of being tied down to the handset provided by the CDMA service operator? “Sistema has money to put in and that is an advantage. But its entry into mobile services through CDMA is a suicidal strategy as the market has clearly rejected the technology. Also, telecom service operators cannot make money as they have to subsidise the phones which adds to the acquisition cost,” says a senior functionary of a rival telecom service company.

    Sistema Shyam does not think so. It says it is getting about 12.5 per cent of the net subscriber additions month-on-month (which includes both GSM and CDMA). Rozanov points out that despite the low tariffs from Reliance Communications on its new GSM service, MTS has actually gained subscribers. Still, the company has not set very ambitious targets. Rozanov hopes to get 8 to 10 per cent of the net additions in each market he enters. If these numbers are reached, he expects the company would be EBITDA-positive in two and a half years.

    The targets may be modest, but Sistema Shyam, it seems, is ready to pay the price game. The company has dropped the price of entry-level colour phones to Rs 999 and it comes with six months of free calls and lifetime validity. “The subsidy that we incur on every phone is going down as the price of phones is going down faster than the fall in new offers,” says Rozanov.

    Enticing users

    Meanwhile, Rozanov is already looking closely at segmenting the market based on subscriber data. He says that the numbers show that a large percentage of his subscribers belong to the SME (small and medium enterprises) segment for which the attraction is a non-congested network and attractive tariffs. The next stage will be to create offers for various segments to expand the market.

    In Tamil Nadu, Sistema Shyam has found that bulk buyers have bought the service because of the large minutes offered free — on its “one million offer”, customers get validity till 2028, apart from 150 minutes of daily local calls free for just Rs 499. Rozanov says that the aggressive pricing has triggered bulk purchases in 50s and 100s from taxi service companies and courier service operators who are looking at how to keep in touch with their employees at minimal cost.

    But will Sistema Shyam be able to enter the home of India’s discerning mobile customer who is being spoilt by choices? Rozanov and his team have a tough challenge to put the MTS flag on the country’s telecom map dominated by local players, Europeans and Asian service majors.

  24. Posted · Report reply

    I think China is having only 10 digits ( Correct me if I am wrong), then why does India need 11 digits?

    Why cannot mobile numbers be allowed to start with 8, 7 , 5,4 and 1?

    This seems to be an unwanted step and unwanted confusions. Lets wait and see

    china and UK having 11 digit number.

    all u have think is from point of view of landline.

    2-bsnl

    3reliance

    4-airtel

    5-other operator like shyam

    6-tata

    7-empty

    8-empty

    9-mobile

    1-spericl numbe like 100 etc

    so 7, and 8 could be possible.

    but why telco are opposing, if is not now, then upgradation has to be done later in future.

  25. Posted · Report reply

    http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Videoco...101599-613.html

    Videocon Commercially Launches DTH Services TodayTechtree News Staff, May 01, 2009 0800 hrs IST

    Newest DTH player on the block

    E-Mail Print The newest player in the Direct-to-home (DTH) arena to commercially launch its services in the country is Videocon. The company has branding its services as 'Videocon D2H'.

    Videocon soft-launched this service in India on April 27.

    With this launch, Videocon becomes the sixth company to offer DTH services in the country.

    There will be 2,500 dealers in 15,000 showroom across India offering Videocon s DTH services.

    The company is targeting 15 lakh subscribers in the first year, followed by a consistent growth of similar figures. It aims to garner one crore subscribers in the next six years, reports the Hindu Business Line.

    Videocon also plans to pioneer TVs with in-built set-top boxes (STBs) in the Indian market. According to a top Videocon spokesperson who spoke with The Hindu Business Line, it has taken the company as many as 40 engineers who have spent nearly 2 years to devise the TV sets with in-built STBs.

    Watch this space for more details on the new Videocon s DTH service as well as pricing.

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