Emerging VAS trends in India

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Emerging VAS trends in India

With about 59 percent of mobile users being low end customers, Onmobile is all set to hit this segment

Genevieve Khongwir

Monday, September 01, 2008

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BANGALORE, INDIA: Subscription based model, sachet based pricing, search ads, service discovery are the new trends in the value added service (VAS), which has a huge market potential in the Indian market.

OnMobile a VAS (Value Added Services) company for mobile, landline and media service providers presented a session on emerging trends of VAS at the Momo Monsoon Bangalore event hosted by Mobile Monday.

The event aimed to create a splash pool of issues, ideas, challenges and opportunities in order to evoke interest and excitement of all stakeholders in the Mobile VAS ecosystem.

Any mobile operator today has over 200 VAS and they try new products to generate revenues. VAS is also being looked from the retail perspective. Mobile operators have tapped lakhs of retail outlets to sell their SIM cards.

The emerging trends of VAS in India show that growth is coming from the bottom of the pyramid with low end users.

Over 2 percent, which is about seven million users are Hi-end users who are very comfortable with data services and high AAPU services, 39 percent were Mid-end which comprised of about 117 million users. This segment showed that they are very comfortable with SMS and learning data services rapidly. The major chunk however comprised of the Low-End users with 59 percent and about 175 million users. Here the segment had a very low SMS usage but were more comfortable with voice and local language.

The usage of SMS had dropped with only 30 percent of the people making use of the service. The main barrier for this was due to lack of literacy, which is a big problem.

OnMobile initiatives
Nevertheless, OnMobile is taking initiatives to penetrate in the rural area and diagnosing what users want in terms of services. Especially, it will focus on: How to go about for users to discover the services and how much they are willing to shell out from the pocket for the services.

Kiran Anandampillai, Head-Consumer Products, OnMobile said: "20-30 percent of the VAS market is RBT (Ring-back Tone) services. Low end users are willing to pay for services if they want them. Song selection has increased by 47 percent per month and song selection per user has increased by 61 percent per month.

Consumers these days are into full-track downloads, which is the hottest applications to hit the market. Ring-back tones are the most popular as the rural user knows how much he is paying for it which is about Rs. 45 and when he asked them they knew the price they were paying for it."

It was surprising to learn that India has the largest miss call alerts in the world with 90 percent. The prepaid market is the biggest market in the country with 90 percent of ads made is directed at them. 3 percent of the total users have a balance of less than Rs. 100. 60 percent of the users have less than Rs. 10 balance and about 10 percent fall in the negative balance category.

OnMobile has also started the OnMobile Developer Network (ODN), which is a mobile application marketplace that fosters telecom VAS initiative. It connects developers, entrepreneurs, content creators, technology companies and carriers and helps them deliver a cutting edge VAS offering to ends users.

ODN is a robust and flexible multi-modal platform and provides features like speech recognition, messaging, call handling, alarm and health monitoring. Ozone enables a product to be delivered using voice, WAP, SMS and MMS.

The ODN offers entrepreneurs and content players a concept to live product with innovative telecom VAS solutions on an established platform. ODN offers instant access to wide market, low risk and minimal cost ownership, low investment and higher ROI, product monetization and revenue share and leveraging OnMobile domain expertise.

The daylong event also had three keynote speeches and four panel discussions, with industry leaders and veterans from Global Ltd, Forum Nokia, Google, July Systems, Yahoo!, Helion Ventures and Sasken Communication Technologies Limited. The topics in discussions were on Micro Finance & Mobile Payments Mobile Marketing & Mobile Advertising, Telecom Platform Opportunities and Mobile Web.

©CIOL Bureau

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Read Comments

sam said on 6/13/2009 2:21:07 PM:
how see online match in computer?

to sam

Abhishek said on 4/3/2009 7:28:57 PM:
Checkout the Antakshari product on Idea 55455, 55855. Pretty interesting one. That has been developed by friends startup Hexolabs(hexolabs.com) on Onmobile ODN platform.

to Abhishek

manojkumar said on 2/13/2009 8:25:42 PM:
IT WAS REALY GOOD ONE

to manojkumar

NIKHIL said on 12/21/2008 1:24:12 AM:
THERE SHOULD BE SOME DETAILS ABOUT THE OPPURTUNITES IN THE TELECOM SECTOR

to NIKHIL

shilpa said on 12/18/2008 11:14:25 AM:
sws

to shilpa

Sujit said on 9/20/2008 8:14:01 PM:
Whats the outcome of the discussions ?

to Sujit

ganesh said on 9/1/2008 2:05:29 PM:
no comments

to ganesh

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