Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Despite everything else and Reliance, Mumbai's color is no doubt Orange. And that is not just about numbers. Thanks to some good marketing, also market education, Hutchison Max Telecom continues to lead India's most lucrative mobile market both in terms of subscriber base and profitability.

Despite new entrants in the market, the company registered impressive growth in FY 2003–04, both in terms of revenue and subscriber base. At Rs 850 crore revenues in FY 2003–04, the company saw a 20 percent growth over the previous year's Rs 711 crore. With a subscriber base of 1,171,205 in May 2004 (a 60.68 percent growth over May 2003) HMTL had an ARPU of Rs 608.27 in last quarter of FY 2003–04, the highest in the country.

 Mumbai being the most lucrative circle, players have to constantly innovate to keep their existing subscribers and attract more customers. HMTL focused on the existing 2.5G technology (GPRS) to offer the 3G experience to its customers. Value-added services (VAS) contributed close to 18 percent of the total revenue at HMTL.

The business philosophy has been to focus on postpaid as it directly reflects on the ARPU and is also the revenue generator for the operator. The company has also been active on the prepaid front as it involves reduced operational costs and adds to the overall subscriber numbers. HMTL has various schemes to attract new postpaid customers, such as, waiving of certain SMS and caller identification charges and various other benefits for the first few months of a subscription.

It offers zonal roaming at a minimal monthly charge in the circles of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa, and Rajasthan without having to opt for the STD facility. Through its GPRS service it also offers innovative data services like Microsoft Outlook on the mobile and push-to-talk, to give stiff competition to immediate competitors like BPL Mobile and Bharti.

For the operator, the GPRS subscriber base was the highest from the Mumbai circle. CDMA players like Reliance and Tata Teleservices are still a matter of concern to the cellular operator, as they initiated major tariff cuts on voice, data, and other related services.

The portfolio of data services comprises all SMS and SMS-based services as well as GPRS-based services. In addition to peer-to-peer SMS, it provides a wide range of SMS-based services such as cricket scores, stock updates, flight information, Yahoo Messenger on SMS, checking e-mail on Hotmail or Yahoo by SMS, and now even checking office mails on SMS.

The Hutch GPRS service portfolio comprises multimedia messaging service (MMS), 'live' video replays, Click & Print MMS, wireless Internet access, mobile gaming, and the recently launched push2talk service.

HMTL has partnered with Ericsson for its switch, IN, and GPRS; and Motorola for radio. It has been allocated additional 10 MHz of spectrum for the Mumbai circle. It is also gearing up to offer enhanced data services on the EDGE platform, very shortly. The investment in Mumbai will be around Rs 20 crore for the project.

Currently, Orange has the largest number of cellsites deployed in Mumbai amongst all operators (including GSM as well as non-GSM operators). Orange covers Mumbai with over 650 cellsites and has four MSCs.

Orange also plans to retain capacity leadership in the city with an additional deployment of 170 more cell sites. To improve voice quality, Orange has deployed the 'Intelligent Optimization Service,' software from Motorola. It provides optimal use of spectrum, leading to high voice quality.