Shailendra Bhatnagar

NEW DELHI: Reliance Communications Ventures Ltd., India's second-ranked mobile services firm, hopes new services will help it sustain rapid growth that delivered a 27 percent jump in data users over the past six months.

Mahesh Prasad, the company's president for application solutions and content, said that the number of customers signing up for ,a href="http://www.ciol.com/content/search/showarticle.asp?arid=80925&way=search"wireless services had grown rapidly from a base of 5.5 million users in December.

"The latest numbers point to upwards of 7 million users (by May). There has been steady growth month over month -- data is where the future is going," Prasad said on the sidelines of a company event.

"Data and content is 20-25 percent of the revenue pie when you look at markets in Japan, Korea and Europe."

Mobile revenue in India, the world's fastest growing wireless services market, is still dominated by voice services, and Prasad declined to give the percentage contribution to his firm's sales from value-added services.

Reliance Communications, India's top CDMA-services provider, has perhaps the widest array of such services, which include cricket score updates, video streaming, cinema, ringtones, gaming, and airline and railway ticketing.

They contributed 10.7 percent of mobile revenue for larger rival Bharti Airtel Ltd. in the fourth quarter up from 9.7 percent in the third quarter.

Reliance Communications, whose board has approved a sponsored secondary sale of stock overseas for up to $1 billion to attract foreign investors, has more than 18.3 million CDMA and GSM users out of a total market of 93.47 million wireless customers.

Data and video capable

Prasad said 10 million of the firm's users had handsets capable of surfing the Internet at high speeds and viewing video clips, of whom 70 percent used value-added services.

"As we increase subscribers, it will be proportionate to that. I hope that we'll increase the penetration from 70 percent 12 months from now."

These services help carriers to retain customers and boost revenue at a time when cut-throat competition is slashing margins.

Reliance Communications charges between 2 and 10 rupees for such services compared with 0.40 rupees for a one minute call within its network.

"Nearly 10 percent of traffic on the network is messaging, data and multimedia content," Prasad said.

Reliance Communications also offers mobile content in Hindi, the language used by nearly 40 percent of India's billion-plus people.

The firm is expanding its network to 8,000 towns from 5,000 now, and a vast chunk of growth will come from expansion into untapped areas.

"Most the growth is going to come from these cities ... we have never believed that data or mobile content consumption is only for cities like Mumbai or Delhi."