RETAIL SERVICES: Consumer Becomes the King!

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The fiscal 2004–05 proved to be boom time for the consumer telecom services with mobile services having a dream run. Reduced telecom tariff coupled with more affordable handsets led to explosive growth of mobile services. The mobile subscriber base increase by 17.9 million reaching a 52.35 million. Of the total additions, Bharti accounted for 4.22 million, followed by BSNL with 4.1 million, Reliance Infocomm with 3.19 million, and Hutch with 7.8 million.

Mobile data services showned an increasingly significant growth. While SMS still accounts for the largest share of operators' data services revenue, other data services including MMS, mobile Internet/e-mail access, ring tones, ringback tones, wallpapers, gaming, branded content also grew significantly. Bharti's non-voice revenue accounted for 9.4 percent of its revenue. This includes SMS, voice mail, call management, and other value-added services like Hello Tunes and Airtel Live. SMS accounted for 6.3 percent of its revenue. Though no statistics are available from Hutch, it is clear that high data and VAS usage was one of a reasons why it had the highest ARPU among GSM operators.

Though there was no major excitement in the retail basic services market except for launch of DSL services by some operators, the total subscriber base of all the private basic operators crossed the five million mark. Growing at a rate of around 116 percent, private operators added around 2.7 million fixed line subscribers in
FY 2004–04. Overall, the fixed phone subscriber base grew by 4.22 million in FY 2004–05. In FY 2003–04, it had grown at 5.6 percent. But, BSNL still had a waiting list of more than a million phones, mostly from rural areas.

FY 2004–05 was a good year for Internet services too, after a stagnant 2003–04. Acting on TRAI's recommendations, the broadband policy was unveiled in October 2004. It specified that only the Internet access at speeds over 256 kbps was to qualify as broadband. The year also saw total Internet subscribers touching 5.5 million with broadband subscribers at around 1.8 lakh. Internet telephony also became popular with 142.56 million voice minutes, an increase of 104 percent over the last year.

Thanks to Motorola's launch of affordable handsets in the Rs 1700 band, retail subscribers could look forward to buying phones from the legal market. Further price reduction in entry-level handsets is possibile with global manufacturers setting up shop in India. The year 2005 is also going to be eventful for the retail customers. Already, operators have launched new offerings. Most of the operators launched GPRS services with attractive packages. Operators offer access to e-mail and Internet even on roaming. Bharti also launched photo album services, by which subscriber can click a photograph from the camera phone and uploaded it to the operators' website by sending an SMS. Each subscriber has 1 GB of space on this service. On the customer services front, most of the operators worked towards improving customer care, both offline and online. Realizing the difficulties faced by subscribers in paying their bills, BSNL allowed post offices to receive the phone bill payments. MTNL has introduced drop boxes where subscribers can drop their cheques. Hutch and Airtel have introduced excellent online billing systems. MTNL has also introduced its online customer portal recently.

All this will help in better customer experience.

Sudesh Prasad