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BANGALORE, INDIA: In an interview with CIOL, Poonam Kaul, Head Communications, Nokia India shares the Nokia's aproach for the VAS market in India and its plans with operators to make it easy to access Internet content and services directly from their Nokia handsets.
 
Excerpts: 

Q: How do you find the mobile music sales market in India?

In India mobile devices have emerged as one of the most preferred mediums for listening to music. As per a recent industry research by Synovate, 61 per cent of the youth in India prefer to listen to music on their mobile devices vis-a-vis other gadgets. As per another report, revenue from mobile music is expected to grow to nearly 23 per cent of overall music revenues by 2010 (source: KPMG India).  All these are very positive trends.

Q: What is Nokia’s music strategy for the Indian market?

Nokia follows a three-pronged mobile music strategy - 1. Introduce devices that ignite consumers’ imagination with advanced multimedia capabilities, 2. Enrich the devices with Music Store / Comes with Music services that aim to offer the best possible mobile music experience using Internet as a common thread and 3. Create an ecosystem through partnerships that benefit the consumers with the best possible and most updated local content.

How has been the customer response been  to the Nokia Music store?

We have had a phenomenal response from our consumers across countries where Music Store is available, the share of wireless downloads has exceeded our expectations - about 35 per cent of visitors to our music stores are via mobile. We are very encouraged by these trends as its clear that people value the immediacy and spontaneity of having access to music directly from their mobile device. We have seen a similar response in India with our Music Store offering and are confident that the number of users will grow in the coming year.

Q: What are the popular downloads from Nokia music Store?

In India we offer over 3 million tracks available from both international and Indian labels, with new songs being added every week and since every user has his/her own choice of music we cannot distinguish between popular and not so popular downloads.

Q: What are the opportunities for Nokia services in rural as well as urban areas?

Rural and urban India has immense opportunities for Nokia in the services space. The consumer today is looking for much more than basic utility and entertainment features. The industry as a whole is in the middle of a transformation. It’s moving from a device perspective to an experience industry and we at Nokia are making conscious long term effort to capitalize it. For example, with Nokia Life Tools we are trying to move up the value curve as for most of the rural India, a mobile phone is most often the very first gadget that they purchase, so it seems like a ‘magic box’ that offers information, connectivity and security.  This helped us to come up with agricultural, educational service offerings that would help them in their day to day functioning.

Hence, Nokia is aiming at maximizing customer value by reducing the total cost of ownership for consumers. We work closely with operators to make it easy to access internet content and services directly from their Nokia device. Many operators are scaling down their content activities and are asking companies like Nokia to offer end-to-end experiences to create data traffic in their mobile networks.

We have implemented a holistic strategy and will continue to launch innovative services and relevant localized content for the rural and urban markets in times to come.

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