India’s Mobile Economy
India’s Mobile Economy
Everyone you know has got one. This is how the millions of sets mean to the economy.
Source: GSM Association, 2013 October, TRAI, RBI, IFPI, Ficci-KMPG.
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Anil Singh wakes at 6 am. Instinctively, he reaches for his iPhone. The usual overnight pile-up of e-mail leads to the regular morning musing—to reply right away or later? The calendar alarm going off settles the debate; he bookmarks a few, replies immediately to his boss, the workaholic. A big online sale is on today and Anil wants to log in after breakfast. He’ll use his other phone, the Blackberry with lower data rates, for this. But first, he must pay his electricity bill online. He’ll tackle the shopping during the drive to work, after a few important calls.
The situation at work calls for some swift time management: Anil sacrifices the day’s Facebook updates. Lucky Anil, for Mumbai has had elections recently. Two political parties in the fray, MNS and Shiv Sena, set up free WiFi along his route to work from Mumbra Devi, though he can’t stream for too long on these freebie connections. The party’s name shows up as he connects, but urgent shopping calls for quick apolitical moves. He steps out while logging in and finds his driver, Sanjeet, waiting. Sanjeet is 35 and wants to return to Bangalore where his family is. He signed up with a website that, as he recently informed Anil, matches blue-collar job-seekers like him to employees using mobile phones and the net.
Sanjeet’s plumber (and plumper) brother-in-law Rakesh had come with news of this site last month. It had helped a mutual friend find an ‘embassy kitchen’ to work at in Delhi, he had said. Sanjeet wants to be lucky like that. Since he signed up, offering his work-ex and qualifications, the website has sent him the occasional SMS. Twice he responded to the number that came with the texts, and once he gave a missed call to a number, landing up on an IVRS, or interactive voice response system, which ‘spoke’ with him in Kannada. It worked. He hasn’t told Anil this yet, but he accepted a new job in his hometown last week and plans to quit right after Diwali.
Anil wonders often during their daily drive how Sanjeet can possibly get by with his modest Rs 1,200 phone—his driver always seems to be on the phone, either texting or calling or listening to the radio, if not playing games. But fact is that only 30 per cent of Indians are like Anil, using phones with 3G, or a ‘rich data connection’. Everybody else makes do with little mobile internet access.
Actually, Babajob.com sends several millions of text messages every month to prospective job-seekers, including plumbers, drivers, carpenters, masons, mechanics, cooks and all the other Sanjeets of India. The company doesn’t ‘place’ people, but sets up a marketplace where job-seekers and employers can get in touch. Its three million registered job-seekers receive texts in English, or in a Roman-character version of their native language.
However, the lack of English skills doesn’t deter even the illiterate from signing up for a Babajob on their phone, the company finds. “Now over half of our visitors, at least 3-4 times more than last year, are mobile web users,” says Vir Kashyap, COO, Babajob.com. The business has got more heavily SMS-based over the last 12-18 months as Indians tap into a near-innate ability to identify place names without being able to read. It’s a little like being able to identify the right medicine from its bottle or recognising your bus route without being able to read. “We find that people are able to identify the city name, the job category, the location of their job interview quite easily,” says Kashyap. Consequently, the response rate to his SMS alerts is 20 or 30 per cent, which, he says, is ‘quite good’.
Nineteen years of mobile telephony later, even a large-screen phone is now within reach in the Rs 1,000-2,600 range. This means even the 800 million regular-handset users can live the handheld life. Considering Indians are habitual cellphone users—like the text-savvy Sanjeet—there’s a bonus in it for mobile service providers. “India being a pre-paid market, service providers know that once a consumer buys recharge he’s going to spend it all. That’s where content becomes important,” says Prasanth Mohanachandran, founder and CEO, AgencyDigi, a digital strategy and branding company. “It doesn’t matter whether the recharge is worth Rs 100 or 3,000—you know all of it will be spent.”
What Indians spend this recharge on is critical for the industry. Mobile industry analyst Mahesh Uppal says data is the only market in the future. “There are only 24 hours in a day and only so much that you can talk, so operators have to develop the data market which is currently very weak,” he says.
The move from voice to data shows up in the ‘non-voice’ chunk of mobile operators’ revenues—Rs 171 crore in 2005 to Rs 4,930 crore in 2012, according to a GSM Association report. Mobile content and services grew to a Rs 3,800 crore business in 2012, it says. But this is still but a fraction of the mobile economy worth well over Rs 1 lakh crore. As Uppal says, “Demand has just not grown to a level we can call substantial.”
Take the easy part of the data gamble—services such as gaming and music, both slotted to be the next big booms. “Worldwide, a smartphone user downloads two apps a month. Half are games. Hence, we have 15 million game downloads a month,” says Alok Kejriwal, CEO and co-founder of Games2Win. “Imagine what happens when 300 million phones get rich data connections and people begin downloading three-four games a month! India is going to be the biggest mobile gaming market in the world,” he says.
Ditto for music: while Indians are still wearing the earphones-plugged-in-ear look, streaming services have come and gone, with only a handful of success stories—the Pandora, Gaana and Raaga dot-coms are here but the big league remains on the horizon. Similarly, mobile banking/payments, agricultural productivity apps, educational services—each needs a big boost. “Markets develop through discounts, deals, bonanzas and sales. The operators don’t seem to be doing that—they’re risk-averse, perhaps afraid they won’t be able to raise prices later,” says Uppal. But everyone senses the opportunity—mobile is the way forward.
Next year 4G year would come ashore, with ever-improving data speeds and quality, though at a time when 3G is yet to take firm roots. Will this lead to even more pick-up in the mobile economy? Maybe, feel experts. Will a 4G handset worth perhaps Rs 20,000 be the pick of everybody in town? Maybe not for wallet-watching Sanjeet—though Anil may want to get his wife that phone for Diwali.
(Anil, Sanjeet and Rakesh have been created to convey mobile usage trends.)
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